How large is your congregation's collection? If you are talking about 100s vs. 1,000s or 10,000s of items, it makes a big difference in the amount of work that goes into setting up and then maintaining an automated system.

Anyone who has read the listserv knows I am a devotee of MARC, but depending on how many items are in your collection and how they are used (lent out? used chiefly by one music director? etc.), it might be overkill to go for a fully automated MARC system. And that's not knocking Koha in anyway: it's just that set up and collection maintenance factor again. (One of my cataloguing supervisors, and a dear mentor, is a wiz with MARC and has prepared consultant reports on automation, but in dealing with setting up her church's new (and intended to be small) congregational library, a full MARC system wasn't even considered.)

There are online resources that would help introduce you to MARC coding. A good one to start with, one that helps demystify MARC greatly, is readily available off the Library of Congress (LC) MARC Documentation page (URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/) and is entitled Understanding MARC Bibliographic: surf to URL http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/ and check it out.

I am not a music cataloguer, but I would be glad to provide whatever MARC and general cataloguing guidance I could. Also I have a good lib tech friend who works in a music library who I am sure I could impose upon for questions of musicology in cataloguing.

As for customary library practices, the best practices are what work best for you and your clients with your collection. There are many of us on Koha -- and on other library listservs that you could subscribe to for that matter -- that would gladly offer whatever free advice we could on professional standards and our own experiences. So don't worry about that.

If you are automating from scratch that poses a different set of questions than if you are automating from a collection indexed or catalogued in some manner. Do you have a card or book catalogue?

To be fair, MARC cataloguing for music isn't as available as MARC cataloguing for books, but that's understandable. I did some quick checking -- testing out my local provincial university's Music Library catalogue with a keyword search on "choral" -- and that generated 100s of results, which bodes well. Since LC, NLC and other national level institutions do catalogue music, as do university libraries with music faculty, you should be okay with that, depending on how esoteric your collection is.

From a recent response from Paul, the "Authorised values" and "Thesaurus" functions -- technically a part of the Authorities (that which determine valid forms for a library catalogue and which cross-reference the collection) -- will be undergoing upgrading.

I know from reading it frequently that you have to define your Item Types and the MARC tag structure first off. Josh F. and Stephen Hedges have provided other start-up advice regularly and recently, so they or other cognescenti will hopefully respond soonish with what else you need to do. (I am still not clear on the "Links Koha-MARC DB" thing myself, but then again, I have a programmer friend helping me and have thereby avoided those computer-y issues I know I am not ready to deal with yet.)

Hope some of the above helps. Give me a shout off listserv anytime you'd like guidance with MARC, MARC records, cataloguing or library management issues.

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