[Koha] Using Koha

[Steven F.Baljkas]

Sunday, July 30, 2006    20:20 CDT

Hi, Trupti,

In answer to your questions ...

> Are the tags below 010 required? ...

If you are talking about MARC21 (formerly USMARC, CANMARC, etc., harmonized: note that UKMARC will be 'joined' with this, too; UNIMARC, chiefly continental European, is markedly different, clearly distinguishable by where Title and Statement of Responsibility are coded, 200, vs. 245 in MARC21 and its precedents/parallels), the following fields below 010 are required according to MARC development and usage standards:
     the Leader (what you have referred to as 000), and
     the 008 (and sometimes 006 and 007, depending on the exact nature of the
       record).

> ... If so does Koha recognize it?

Koha previously could be made to recognise these fields (though not included with Koha as distributed) but a newer version of the MARC framework is now apparently downloadable and is able to process the data.

Like many ILS, however, it does not appear that Koha actually does anything with the data at present (many ILS don't make full use of all the data that a MARC record encodes). That may change in future versions.

> Also since we have not used Marc, we would like to know how do we enter
> data. For example, should the title be entered as
>
> 245 10 $a Computer Science  OR
> Computer Science.

How data should be entered is up to you when you do things locally. MARC is actually quite flexible.

However other accompanying standards are much more rigid. If you hope to make use of shared data (i.e. download records via Z39.50 or otherwise), you have to keep those standards in mind unless you want to be making a lot of 'corrections' to what you download to match your local practices.

For example, most North American libraries would use MARC standards to code information for their ILS in conjunction with the standards prescribed in (some version of) the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 2nd edition (AACR2R), which include standards for capitalization and punctuation from the International Standard for Bibliographic Description (General) or ISBD(G).

Taking your example from above, then, a work with the title _Computer Science_ would be encoded as follows according to those standards:

  245  10 $a Computer science
or 
  245  10 $a Computer science. ***

You could also encode it as

  245  10 $a Computer science. --

if you really wanted to follow the full traditional punctuation (which most libraries and ILS don't).

*** I would include the period at the end just for clarity. Note the punctuation prescribed by common standards.

The standards that you are using, incidentally, are encoded in the Leader (sometimes called the 000).

If you would like some example records, please feel free to send me some data (a small dataset or list) off listserv and I'll do what I can to help you out.

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada


============================================================
From: "Truptee Shah" <truptee.shah at gmail.com>
Date: 2006/07/28 Fri AM 06:07:33 CDT
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Using Koha

We have installed KOha and are trying to use it for our library. We have
some problems using MARC tags. We seek your help for the same.

Are the tags below 010 required? If so does Koha recognize it?

Also since we have not used Marc, we would like to know how do we enter
data. For example, should the title be entered as

245 10 $a Computer Science  OR
Computer Science.

Do we need to enter anything in the tag 000 or is it machine generated.

--Trupti

(koha user from India)