[Koha] Importing and updating bibliographic records

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Hi Frederic, thanks again for your prompt and helpful reply.

> Yes, but it could be tricky. bulkmarcimport.pl script invokes biblio.pm 
> functions as you can imagine. But it do it correctly, ie it call several 
> functions in order to add both biblio records AND their related item 
> records. If you want to do it directly you have to hack 
> bullmarcimport.pl script and understand how it works.

Then it is of course more straightforward to just produce unimarc
records and feed them to bulkmarcimport... Thanks for having clarified
this.

> > And also, are there functionalities in Koha's web interface that could 
> > be used to enrich an existing bibliographic record (or set of existing 
> > bibliographic records) with data fetched, say, from a Z39.50 server ?
> 
> (1) In Koha data entry page, you can perform a Z39.50 search. But you 
> can't merge the result of a Z39.50 search with an existing biblio 
> record. You can just overlap it or create a new record. (2) Another 
> solution would be to use a standard z39.50 client in order create 
> iso2709 file. Then you import this file into Koha with Tools > Stage 
> MARC Records. In Manage Staged MARC Record, you can specify a matching 
> rule. But here again, you can't choose to merge records (new and old). 
> You just can replace, add or ignore. So there are two places in Koha 
> where some improvements would help you to do what you need to do.

Well, not ure whether this could be automated.
As I understand things, what I have to do is to first generate MARC
records for all the titles we have in our catalog and then import them
into koha. Then, as a second step, get the sbject headings for those
titles from e.g. the national library and add them to the existing
records.
If anybody thinks this doesn't make sense, please do not hesitate to let
me know. I'm completely new to the field so I ay very well be completely
wrong.

Thanks,
Sébastien.