[Koha] Batch imports of MARC records for e-books and 099 fields for regular books

[Stacy Pober]

I've been experimenting with batch importing vendor-supplied MARC
records for some of the electronic books we have.   The e-books upload
fine, and look okay with one big exception:  In a search result
screen, these item records show up with "Availability: No items
available:"

If you click on the title, the full record does show the working URL
to the book, but that "no items available" message will discourage
users from clicking on it.   Example of record:
<http://wxman.sandbox.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=211416>
or shorter link: <http://bit.ly/7YOcdA>

I found that if  I changed three fields in the holdings:

Koha Item Type:  Electronic book
Collection code: Ebooks
Shelving Location: EBOOKS

then the e-book correctly shows up as EBOOK in the summary display.

However, the prospect of manually editing over 3000 holdings records
is too hideous to contemplate.

Is thers some shortcut to change all of an incoming batch of MARC-21
records to have the same holdings information?  If so, could someone
here kindly guide me through it?

Before uploading the MARC file for the first 200+ records, I used a
text editor that could handle large files and  prepended our EZproxy
string onto the book's URL using a macro. That went smoothly.   If
there is no shortcut or tool in Koha for changing holdings on a large
batch of records at once, is there some workaround using an external
tool that would let me edit the information into the records before
uploading them?

099 issues:
We have a  number of e-books that were cataloged in Voyager, the
system we used before Koha.  The Voyager produced records MARC 099
field information that listed them as e-books, and they don't have the
"availability message" problem.   I would have liked to see whether
adding an 099 field with identical information to the incoming records
would fix this, but these records do not have 099's provided by the
vendor, since that field is used for a Local Free-Text Call Number.
When I open the editor in Koha, I see no way to add this field to an
existing record.  We have editable 099 fields for records if they were
migrated from our old catalog and already contained an 099 field.
However, when we upload records without 099 fields from other sources,
we see no way to add the field..  The apparent lack of a method to add
099 fields to imported MARC records has proved to be a significant
problem for our Cataloger.  That issue affects not just e-books but
also many other types of items.

Ideally, I'd like to have an actual link to the e-book, or at least to
the book's Koha record in the summary results field of the opac.  But
right now, I'll settle for some way to change "no items available" to
"EBOOK" without hand-editing thousands of records.

And if anyone can tell me how to add an 099 field to an item that
isn't imported with one, I'd be most grateful to learn that.

We are using 3.01.00.037 with LibLime Enterprise Koha build: 4.0100000.

And yes, I do know LEK isn't real open source Koha, but there isn't a
LEK user's list which I can join.  The support list LibLime set up for
bug reports has booted me and some other subscribers off because, I
was told, they wanted to limit participation on that list as there was
getting to be to much traffic.   They also refuse to give us access to
the LEK Bugzilla tracking, even on a read-only basis... but that's
another story.

I'm on digest, so please cc: me on any answers sent to the list.

Advance thanks.

 --
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Library
Riverdale, NY 10471
stacy.pober at manhattan.edu