[Koha] Koha as a journal citation catalog

[Paul]

Fred - thank you. We've also been interested in this "challenge", but for 
the moment have not resolved it using Koha. Comments interspersed below:

At 01:58 PM 9/25/2013 -0400, Fred King wrote:
>[snip] Unfortunately, it's behind a firewall so I can't give you a link

Please see: 
<http://opac.navalmarinearchive.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=20565> 
and note that we have had to use:

856 ## - ELECTRONIC LOCATION AND ACCESS
Uniform Resource Identifier 
<http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/on_line_content_e.html>http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/on_line_content_e.html 

Public note Full index by publishers

It's not Koha, but it's fully searchable (thanks to Google) and meets 
academic requirements (the journal is also available through Ebsco, but as 
you well know this is not available to the great unwashed public.)

As we're the publishers of this particular journal, it's perhaps "normal" 
that we can adjust various web resources to meet our requirements; in other 
cases we have used the same 856 solution to refer to more simplistic 
(non-MARC) indices, e.g. 
<http://opac.navalmarinearchive.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=20403> 
-- not very clever, but functional.

>My conclusion: yes. It takes a lot of work to set up, and it takes more
>steps than I'd like to convert Medline records to (my modified version of)
>MARC, but the end product is a lot more versatile than the bare Medline
>citations with local authors' names highlighted, which is what we had.

I'm less worried about "my modified version of" than being a MARC purist. 
And I don't think that we're alone in thinking that many/most "library 
systems" consider journals and periodicals as just the last couple of 
months of a subscription. Holding a "run" of over a hundred years, and 
wanting to make the "library system" into a useful research tool appears to 
be neglected. Compare our indexing of "The Rudder" with anything in 
WorldCat ...

>[snip] We're using Koha 3.12, running Ubuntu.

For the record, we're 3.8.5 (with customization) on Ubuntu 12.04. In our 
two year cycle, we'll look at upgrading Koha when we upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.

>[snip] 6. Compile the citations into a .mrc file with MarcEdit.

With [absolutely] the greatest of respect for Terry Reese, MarcEdit is 
Windows[1] only -- I've never been able to get it running in Wine.

>A few thoughts: [snip]
>Why modify Koha instead of using some other system? I didn't want our
>users to have to learn another system. Neither did I. Koha is easy to use,
>and we're using it for our library catalog already.

I am also a great believer in Koha, but we're not a lending/ILL library so 
admit very openly that our requirements are not "mainstream." It's great 
for single item biblios (in the sense of "books") but is challenging for 
drilling down to articles over long runs of serials.

You and I are obviously facing the same challenge, resolving it in 
different manners. I'm wondering how many others out there have the same goals?

[1] the only Windows boxes I have left are 98SE, which will not, 
unsurprisingly, accommodate MarcEdit.

Best - Paul