[Koha] What to use, UNIMARC or MARC21 ?

[Curtis Rempel]

Greetings,

I’ve been exploring how to convert our aging church library system (running L4U, which is aimed at school libraries) to koha.  

So far I’ve got everything installed and running in a vm (so I can easily snapshot and revert when I mess it up) with the patron list imported after running the exported list from L4U through some scripts to fix up data and build a csv file.

Next on the list is the catalog.  L4U exports in MARC format which should be easy enough to import, however, during koha config, I had to choose between UNIMARC or MARC21.  Full disclaimer: I’m a Linux guy, I wouldn’t know a UNIMARC or a MARC21 record if one fell out of the sky and knocked me out cold.  :-)   How would one know what to choose here?   Would I somehow be able to determine what MARC flavour the L4U export is?   Does it even matter?

I’m sure I’ll come up with more questions but for now I’m going to forge ahead and try to import the catalog and see what happens.

Thanks in advance!

Curtis Rempel