[Koha] Koha/Zebra record lengths

[Arturo Longoria]

Hi Paul,

Our library also ran into this issue with really large bib records for long-running periodicals. This was back in 2017, and this bug was filed where the issue was discussed: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15399

If I remember correctly, it seems that there may be some ways to fine-tune your Koha settings to allow for indexing records that are larger than the ~1MB size limit, but doing so breaks the ability to run your Koha as a Z39.50 server. The discussion in the bug I linked to explains this more.

So, for our library, since we are set up to use Z39.50, it was a no-go. We opted instead to break up our huge bib records into more manageable records that don't bump up against the size limit. So, our long-running periodical records are now broken up by decades/time periods and we use the MARC 780/785 fields to indicate the previous/next record in the series, like so: https://catalog.sll.texas.gov/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=385

I hope this helps.

Arturo Longoria
Reference Librarian/Web Manager
Texas State Law Library
www.sll.texas.gov

-----Original Message-----
From: Koha <koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz> On Behalf Of Paul A
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2019 10:21
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Koha/Zebra record lengths

We've lost a record (opac and staff) biblio + 422 items. It's there in all its glory in MySQL, but Zebra won't show it. The Koha wiki mentions:

"Record length of 101459 is larger than the MARC spec allows (99999
bytes) -- This will show up if you are trying to index a record that has a large number of items (common with serials, for example), or just has a lot of text in the record itself. /.../ Koha can do the indexing by using the MARCXML format rather than ISO 2709, and this gets around the problem. If you add '-x' to the reindex_zebra.pl command when indexing biblios, it will do this"

We always have used '-x' for biblios (did it again a couple of minutes
ago.) No joy

I can (I hope!) just delete the last item (or two or three) from MySQL and reindex, but before I go there, does anyone have previous experience with this problem?

Many thanks --Paul
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