[Koha] Duplicate Biblio Records

[Christopher Davis]

Tim,

Regarding you message about what you should do with duplicate bibliographic
records in Koha, as a cataloger myself, I can tell you that not all
bibliographic records are created equal. Many bibliographic records are
missing subject headings (600's, 650's, etc.) and contributor headings
(700's), not to mention that many records do not meet RDA standards.

FWIW,


Christopher Davis
Systems & E-Services Librarian
Uintah County Library
cgdavis at uintah.utah.gov
(435) 789-0091 <14357890091> ext.261
uintahlibrary.org
basinlibraries.org
facebook.com/uintahcountylibrary
instagram.com/uintahcountylibrary


On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Tim Young <Tim.Young at lightsys.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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