[Koha] help for a friend

[Frederic Demians]

> 1) Export records from our ILS and use MarcEdit to get them like Koha wants them
> 2) Use bulkmarcimport.pl and bulkauthimport.pl to load records
> 3) Run link_bibs_to_authorities.pl
> 4) Run rebuild_zebra.pl
>
> Two problems with authority linking:
> When I'm done with these steps, I can see all loaded bib, item, and
> authority records in my system.  And, some (but not all) of the
> authority records are linked to their related bib records (problem 1).
>   

bulkmarcimport.pl is deprecated. You're supposed to use 
bulkauthimport.pl. Check for your Koha version.

A better approach can be to do biblio record to authorities links before 
importing into Koha. This way you don't have to use 
link_bibs_to_authorities.pl which isn't an accurate method to do 
linking. This script can't deal with homonymy. You can even keep 
authorities ID from the legacy ILS you're coming from.

Between 2 and 3, you should have run rebuild_zebra -r -a to reindex 
authorities. link_bibs_to_authorities.pl try to match authorities 
controlled biblio fields by searching into Zebra authorities indexes.

>  But, when I try to do an author search on a name in an existing
> authority record but not in one of its linked bib records, no results
> are returned (problem 2).
>   

???

> And a tertiary problem:
> I've discovered that some of my records contain errors that cause the
> bulkimport scripts to fail.  I think, but am not sure, that this is
> related to non-Roman characters in the records.  Two questions related
> to this problem:
> 1) Is there are trick for identifying these records before I actually
> try to load them?
>   

Try to use yaz-marcdump command.
 
> 2) I made the dumb mistake of double loading about 8000 authority
> records because I forgot to rebuild_zebra after my authority load
> script failed.  Is there a good way to do one of the following:
>        a) Batch delete all authority records with no bibs attached.
>        b) Batch delete all "duplicate" authority records.
>        c) Wipe out the entire authority table and start from scratch.
>   

Duplicates authorities is the reason why link_bibs_to_authorities.pl 
doesn't work properly. It requires authority exact matching. Delete all 
your authorities and re-import them. For c), in MySQL:

  TRUNCATE auth_header;

--
Frédéric