[Koha] importing a full LoC set of authorities

[hansbkk at gmail.com]

I haven't started actually cataloging yet, other than assembling a
batch of customized MARC records for a subset of our biblios, starting
with a pretty extensive video collection.

I intend to take as much advantage as possible of well-enforced
standard Authority records, but am starting to appreciate how much
extra work will be involved if I have to manually look up
one-at-a-time all the relevant subjects and people via the public
interfaces offered on the web - genre/forms don't seem such a problem
as I'm planning on only actually using a small subset of them.

So I'm exploring the possibility of importing the full set of OCLC/LoC
authority records into my Koha database before I start importing my
biblio records. The subjects aren't so bad, apparently under 300,000,
but I believe the names side of things are several million.

Will doing this greatly slow down my Koha? Our intended production
server is 2GB Core Duo 2Ghz, and we're not likely to have more than a
dozen concurrent users in the early stages - both OPAC and staff
combined. Disk space isn't a problem - I've got a spare 15+ TB
available on our filer's LVM 8-).

Also my understanding is that the link_bibs script does actually work,
as long as the authority-governed fields don't have
existing/conflicting $9 fields, just the exactly-matching name or
subject strings - and updated zebra indexes - and of course properly
configured MARC frameworks. I've seen some references to using the
regular biblio import script for authority records (accompanied by
statements that the authority import script is deprecated), but I've
seen just as many reports that people have had trouble getting that to
work. It also seems that nothing will automatically handle the
bib-to-authority linking at import time, that it *has* to be done via
the link_bibs script.

Confirmation of the above would be greatly appreciated, as would (even
more so) any explanations on where I've gone off track.