[Koha] Avoiding duplicate items during MARC staging/import

[Bales (US), Tasha R]

Is there a cheat sheet for staging and loading MARC records?

I keep getting hung up and am creating duplicate item records during loads, despite continuing to read the manual closely, and experimenting with different options.

I think my problem is with my expectations (coming from Millennium ILS), and my interpretation of the menu options that begin with "Add items..."  I only want to add items if they don't already exist.  What I really want to do is to replace all 952 fields with the new fields I am loading.  However, in practice, the option to "Replace items if matching bib was found (only for existing items)" doesn't seem to accomplish this.  If my file is a mix of existing and new records, it looks like my new records aren't getting items created, presumably because those items didn't already exist.

I don't think it will be useful to share all the scenarios and options I've tried.  Just hoping someone else has similarly misinterpreted the instructions and may have created a "cheat sheet" for which options to select to avoid duplicates.

It may be useful to add that the sample record I am working with at the moment has no barcode numbers in any of its attached items.  I'd like to be able to reload this MARC record and wipe all the items out, replacing with whatever items are in my new MARC file, but my actions so far have only loaded more items, resulting in duplicates.

Thanks for your time,


Tasha Bales
Enterprise Services
http://isesi.web.boeing.com/