[Koha] Getting books into the database

Fri Aug 25 11:04:39 NZST 2006

Thursday, August 24, 2006    17:49 CDT

Thaetviking,

Alex has already provided a good answer to your questions, so this rushed e-mail will only serve as an addendum for now.

Please note, I am willing to help out with MARC record data issues, and converting from Follett data records falls into that broad category. I don't know what the shape of your data is, but I can help get you started at least in converting it into proper MARC21.

It has been some time, but I do vaguely recall Follett being able to export delimited text. If that is correct, then you are in luck, because there is an excellent free utility called MARCEdit, developed by Terry Reese and available off of the Library of Congress MARC Records, Services and Tools page at

    URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html> .

This excellent program can convert delimited text into valid MARC21 records. 

(And please people: could we start calling it by its proper name, MARC21? USMARC records, CANMARC, etc. persist but all new records created by the higher authorities (at the least) are now MARC21 and the rules governing record validity are MARC21. Sorry. Back off the soapbox now ...)

The MARCEdit editor also provides a very neat tagged record format which makes it easy to correct and add to records before converting the text into MARC.

If you do end up losing your barcode data, manual re-insertion of the barcodes would likely be easiest to do using the MARCEdit editor.

When you are done editing and have automagically converted the records using MARCEdit, you can then use Koha's bulkmarkimport script to upload the whole lot.

Thaetviking, if you are unsure about the structure of what Follett is exporting (I didn't understand your comment about not knowing exactly where the DB is), feel free to send me a small sample off listserv and I'll take a look at it for you by the end of the weekend. That's the best I can do right now with circumstances here as they are.

On to the rest ...

Have no idea what CDDB is. Always best to define acronyms and abbreviations that might not be clear to all. At least that way, we all may learn something. 

As for using barcodes as identifiers, there are a few reasons in cataloguing that make this unwise. For one thing, barcodes get lost, defaced, destroyed, and replaced. For another, not all systems would tolerate using barcodes in the way I think you mean, and as wonderful as Koha is, one should always free up options for future migrations rather than limit them. In any case, if you want a unique identifier, the record number (field 001) can serve as a unique key for the metadata.

Again: get back to me with a Follett sample if you are unsure; and, I am more than willing to help out to the extent that I can long-distance with your MARC record conversion (I just can't do it all for you as I have 3 volunteer Koha MARC record projects on the go now).

Hope that this has helped a bit.

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

"At 13 I knew everything. Senility set in some time after."
  -- Harvey Fierstein, _Torch Song Trilogy_

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From: thaetviking <c_middleman at yahoo.com>
Date: 2006/08/24 Thu AM 08:26:29 CDT
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Getting books into the database

I have been given the joy of redoing everything in our library because of
some ineptness.  I need quick answers if possible.  We are running Follett
and the novell server died and I was given the task of dealing with this
after the person who ran it was fired.  I would like to move to open source
but was wondering can you convert the tables for follet?  Also can you scan
the barcode on a book and have it up the information on the web kind of like
CDDB?  Since we already have barcodes made for each book can we use the
pre-generated ones as their identifier?  I really appreciate any help.  I am
not sure were exactley the DB is so the last two questions may be more to
the meat of what I need?
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