[Koha] Duplicate Biblio Records

[Tim Young]

Every once in a while I help out with a Koha installation.

At the moment, they have asked me to fix a bunch of duplicate biblio 
records.  I have found two main ways to do this.

A  manual way where you are in control every step of the way: 
http://manual.koha-community.org/3.2/en/stafflists.html#mergebibrecs

And a potentially destructive way where you  just guess and see what 
happens: 
https://saturn.ffzg.hr/koha/index.cgi?action=revision_view;page_name=removing_duplicate_records;revision_id=20091114221320


As I understand it, the latter basically has you choose one of the 
biblio records, point all your identical items to the one biblio record, 
and delete the other biblio records.  Then, one runs a script 
(sync_items_in_marc_bib.pl) to add any missing data to the biblio record 
by pulling the data from the items.

Being a mysql guy and scripting guy, this latter approach seems to be 
the "easy" way to do it.  If I were a librarian and understood the 
biblio data, I might be howling in anguish at the thought of randomly 
selecting the biblio record.  But I have no idea what the information 
means.  I am a sysadmin and have no real understanding nor ownership of 
the data.  And, I am not sure the people asking me to do this job 
completely understand the nuances of this either.

So, I ask the Koha community for advice.  Should I make a little script 
that runs the duplicate biblio sql script, selects one of the biblio 
records to point all the items to, and delete all the other biblio 
records?  One would need to sync the marc items and reindex when done.  
Or is that basically a terrible thing to do?

And, if I make such a script, is there a place where I should put the 
script so others do not need to make the same thing?

     - Tim Young