[Koha] Staff training with a live catalogue

[Elaine Bradtke]

Has anyone trained their staff to use Koha after they've gone live?
Here's our situation.  We will be launching Koha with a discrete
collection of non-circulating material. There are political / funding
reasons for getting this up as soon as possible.
 At the moment, the rest of the staff has no MARC experience, though
they're very good cataloguers in our old system.  Switching to MARC
will be a big change for them, and will take some time, and training.
We'll need to have some sort of system in place where I can review
their work, preferably before it goes public. The plan is that by the
time we import the data for the circulating collection and the patron
information the staff will be fully trained. But there will be a time
period when they're still getting up to speed with MARC (we're all
part time). In effect we will be running two systems at once.  The old
system in house, and the new system (with only one collection to
start) on the web.

Questions:
1) Is there a way to hold back (from the OPAC) newly created MARC
records until they are checked, or a way to flag newly created records
to enable checking if they can't be held pending review?
2) Or, should I consider:
a) a second instance of Koha for training purposes, from which I could
download records and then upload them into our live catalogue, or b) a
branch that is not viewable in the OPAC (is that possible?) from which
I could transfer items to the live catalogue?

I am very much aware how much change and upheaval switching to Koha
means for our staff and I would like to make the transition as
seamless as possible.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated


-- 
Elaine Bradtke
Data Wrangler
VWML
English Folk Dance and Song Society | http://www.efdss.org
Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 7AY
Tel    +44 (0) 20 7485 2206 ext 36
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Registered Company No. 297142
Charity Registered in England and Wales No. 305999
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"
--Elvis Costello (Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52)