[Koha] Springer ebook records

[Stacy Pober]

I loaded about 17,000 Springer ebooks into our catalog.   I did not
directly upload them into Koha, though.  First, I edited them in the
free MarcEdit program to add some fields.

We use EZproxy to allow our users to access IP-restricted resources
from off-campus.   If you use something similar, you would use the
Edit Subfield Data function to alter the 856$u  data.  You would
replace "http:  with something like
"http:ezproxy.yourlibrary.edu:2048/login?url=http:"

Additionally, the Springer ebook MARC records do not come with any
custom link text.  We added custom link text by adding an 856$y
field.  with the text "Available for our library via Springer eBooks.
Click here for access".  The custom link text is often provided in an
856$w field rather than the $y field, and the $w and $y but they seem
to display exactly the same in our catalog, so if you get other
vendor-supplied records with 845$w fields, you don't need to change
them unless you want to customize the link text.

We also add a 952 field to specify the branchcode, ITYPE, shelving
location and CCODE:
\\$aMAN$bMAN$cEBOOKS$oELECTRONIC BOOKS$yEBOOKS$8EBOOKS

The branch code needed to be added because without it, each ebook
appeared in Koha with messages about availability that we did not want
to see. Adding the ITYPE allowed us to  add a "View this eBook" link
to each summary record which is a nice convenience for end-users.

We also add a 500$a field which lists the ebook service name (Springer
eBooks) because that's the standard way we've been listing all other
ebook packages (not all of the vendors have the package name anywhere
in the record) and a 099$a field for Local Call Number of ELECTRONIC
BOOKS because that's the way our other ebooks have always been listed.

You may not need or want this level of customization, but it's nice to
know it's available.

 When I first tried to upload the Springer records,  I could not
upload them in one step. Our catalog is hosted by LibLime and at the
time I processed these records (a couple of months ago), the server
response time was very slow and it would time out for large uploads.
This was the only batch of MARC records I had that was quite so large,
and I had to split the 17,000 records into batches of about 1500
records.  I don't know if there is any effective  limit on file size
for uploads in the official version of Koha.

The processing of the initial file of the large Springer ebook record
set was tedious but routine.  However, Springer issues updated record
sets for books they add to your subscription each month, and I am
currently trying to work through some problems in the December update
file.  The monthly updates come in separate files for each publication
year.  We get five years of books, and rather than having to process
them separately, I used MarcJoin in MarcEdit to concatenate them into
one large file. This did not work, because it turned out there were
some invalid characters in two of the records that caused errors in
the joined file.  I'm still working through that.  The individual
files validate correctly using the validator in MarcEdit, so  I need
to find a 'pickier' MARC validator to find the invalid characters.

One more thing about ebook MARC records generally:  I find that the
quality of publisher-supplied MARC records is very variable.  One
problem we ran into with the MARC  record sets for netLibrary and a
couple of other vendors is that some of the records included multiple
$856$u fields with URL's leading to other subscription-based online
services to which we have no access.   I had to find those bad URLs
and strip them out of our records, and that was a little tedious.
-- 
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Riverdale, NY 10471
stacy.pober at manhattan.edu