[Koha] MARC importing tool?

[MJ Ray]

Wolfgang Pichler <wolfgang.pichler at ivv.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote:
>> Existing data from what? 
> source : ms-access data (id,author, title, maybe isbn and many other 
> fields, all heavily postprocessed by exporting cvs and running heavy 

You store access data in CVS?

> perl-scripts to check if isbn is valid, to try to figure out multiple 
> authors, since they are given with various delimiters [ John & Jack Doe 
> / Doe, John and Jack / Doe, John ; Smith, J. / and all that funny things 
> an unconstrained user may do :-(((,  -- size about 16000 items !)

OK.  You could output MARC records, would be my best guess.  Maybe someone
here can point at helpful things about MARC.

> overall they crunched their audio-tapes and multilingual items into such 
> a system,
> moreover there are borrower's data and currently-issued-states to 
> monitor --- l o t s  of funny things to do /w perl.

I'm not 100% clear on this just now and I doubt it will become clearer
until you have a testbed running.  Maybe other library users can explain
how they cope with current issues while moving to koha?  Just reenter,
run the two systems alongside, or something smarter?

> they wish to reorganize the current overall shelving and collection 
> systematics (not sure where to find it in koha : 
> biblioitems:classification ?)

Again, this is probably something other library users on this list can
advise on, but I think that's where you should be looking.

>> OK, I asked you to restate it because I didn't understand the first 
>> time.  I still don't understand.  Can you rephrase/expand?
> there are many tinyint's and char(1-4) in the db-scheme, which are 
> obviously sometimes booleans, or other indicators for some status
> (biblio:serial == boolean : is a serial?, borrowers:categroycode, 
> reserves:found...).

Yes, I admit that I'm not sure why they are those types instead of
enumerated or foreign keys in another table, unless it's because we're
*still* working without foreign keys in MySQL :-(

> any summaries about these ? or just RTFC ?

A better question for -devel.  If you can post a complete list of these
unexplained ones, developers of the relevant parts will explain it
eventually, I guess.

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