[Koha] ILS Stuff and 952 fields and more stuff about books.

[gsl]

Sorry for the non-specific subject line, but I'm just the sysadmin, and 
to me it's just hardware, Linux, and a database. I can barely read, so 
my best familiarity with books are those with lots of pictures, 
preferably color. Magazines are even better.

OK, the two people we have here working with Koha (3.0 b2) besides me 
have just scored what they consider a major success, so I thought I'd 
share it in case it helps others. It involves importing item records in 
the 999 from Sirsi to the 952 field in Koha. This problem/solution may 
be well known, so this post may be pointless.

The problem was that when importing Marc records from Sirsi which are in 
the 999 field, Koha saw it as a record, but not an item. Koha only 
accepts 952, so the TS manager had to create a 952 field in Sirsi, fill 
in all the bib record info, then when exported that loaded correctly 
into Koha as an item. Most of the subfields loaded. Those that did not 
probably needed to match exactly the parameters we've set up in Koha.  
An example is the branch--she put the branch in as all caps, when in 
fact we've set the branch as mixed upper and lower case characters.  The 
shelving location also did not load, and she's not sure why since it 
does match. It did not add it to the holdings because the MARC record 
that we exported from Sirsi did not include Branch and Location 
information.  We are going to try another with this information.

Despite the caveats at the end of the above paragraph, this was a minor 
breakthrough for us. Maybe we are getting better, and maybe someday 
we'll be PD good.

Greg Lawson
Rolling Hills Consolidated Library
1912 N. Belt Highway
St. Joseph, MO  64506