[Koha] Editing content of MARC field 300 - is this the way to go?

[Michael Kuhn]

Hi Indranil

Thanks for your 2p! :-)

> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 6:49 PM, Michael Kuhn <mik at adminkuhn.ch> wrote:
> <snipped>
>>
>> 3. But the content of tag <leader> in field "marcxml" has NOT changed
>> (so it still shows the old number of characters of the record). I 
 >> don't know if this is a problem or how it could be easily solved.

Since I'm curious I'm wondering if this a problem at all? To show the 
results in the OPAC it seems to be no problem however.

>> My question: Is this the way to go or does anyone have another idea
>> how to accomplish this task? Maybe this is even described in some
 >> documentation?>
> I'm sure you understand that this happened as you bypassed the MARC21
> data handling functions in Koha which would have updated your leaders,

Yes, I understand.

> A crude way I can see to reset them to their actual values could be to
> export the data out to MarcEdit as a .mrk mnemonic file and then back
> to a .mrc file and importing the .mrc file back into Koha, *after*
> truncating everything in your biblio, biblioitems and items table and
> post import followed by a full zebra re-index.
> 
> YMMV and of course back up the database before anything  (but you know
> that already :-) )

Yes, I have also thought about this way but before going it I would like 
to know

a) Is it really NECESSARY at all? I have unloaded the changed record 
(with the old length) and then reloaded the record via menu "Stage MARC 
records for import". The record could be loaded without problems even if 
the old length was wrong (the Stage MARC records tool even corrected the 
old length to the correct new length). It seems like this length doesn't 
mean too much, at least not under these circumstances.

b) Can I also achieve the same result by just calculating the new length 
of the record and also directly write this via SQL UPDATE into field 
"biblioitems.marcxml"? This would spare me unloading, Marcedit, 
truncating, reimporting, reindexing and relinking authorities (but not 
backing up the database, of course ;-)

All hints are very welcome! At the moment it seems to me the record 
length is nice if correct but Koha doesn't really need it.

Best wishes: Michael
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