[Koha] Trying to match and overlay ISBN - (pbk) after ISBN

Joe Atzberger ohiocore at gmail.com
Fri Mar 6 07:13:58 NZDT 2009


Maty --

For your purposes, stripping the "(pbk)" is probably the quickest solution
for the existing data.  The basic ISBN ("190446730X") is also valid MARC21.
I consider this multiplicity unfortunate since it provides an opportunity
for mismatching what should be a reliable identifier.

The longer term fix would be to alter the matching rules, but this should be
done very deterministically including clear tests.  False positives would be
a dealbreaker.

Something like:

sub isbn_compare ($$) {
  my ($isbn1, $isbn2) = @_;
  foreach ($isbn1, $isbn2) {
    $_ =~ s/\D//g;    # kill everything but digits
  }
  return $isbn1 eq $isbn2;
}

--Joe

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Martin McGovern <mmg at interleaf.ie> wrote:

>  Hi,
>
> I’m trying to match and overlay a couple of thousand bibs.
>
> I have already loaded approx 9,000 bibs on the koha database. All have
> ISBNs. But when I try to match and overlay with better records, the incoming
> records have the same ISBN but with (pbk) appended after the ISBN in the 020
> $a - e.g. ­–*a*190446730X (pbk).
>
> This is valid in Marc21. But koha refuses to match on any of these incoming
> records.
>
> I could strip out the (pbk) but that will not fix the problem for new bibs
> in the future.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marty McGovern
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/attachments/20090305/6c53f6a9/attachment-0001.htm 


More information about the Koha mailing list