Roy,

Searches in the catalog are done through Zebra, bot on the OPAC and Intranet.

Within zebra, the diacritics are not indexed. Instead, they are converted to their base caracter. For example, Bartók, Béla are kept as Bartok, Bela.

There is a configuration file to do those character conversion in zebra. There are 2 elements you need to check.

FIRST:
The /etc/koha/zebradb/lang_defs/ directory contains 2 other directories, en and fr. These directories contains a file called sort-string-utf.chr.

That is the file use to convert the diacritics. For example, in the fr (french) folder, one of the line will be

map âàáäăă a

This means that all 'a' modified characters are translated to a.

Creating a new sort-string-utf.chr file in another directory (ex: /etc/koha/zebradb/lang_defs/masscat) or adapting an existitng one solve the first part of your problem.

SECOND
The second part is to make sure zebra is referring the correct file. In your .cfg files located in /etc/koha/zebradb, you have a profilePath. Make sure it contains the path to your sort-string-utf.chr file. (ex: /etc/koha/zebradb/lang_defs/masscat)

Make sure to change the profilePath of all .cfg files.

Hope this helps,

Eric

Rudolph, Roy wrote:

Hi,

I just joined the list. I have little technical understanding of the back end of Koha, but maybe someone knows an answer to this problem:

When searching our catalog ( http://mlon.masscat.org/ ), Koha doesn’t ignore diacritics. So, for example, au,phr: bartok, bela won’t get any hits because the author’s name has diacritics: Bartók, Béla. Pasting in the search term with the accents, I get 231 hits.

Names like Fauré, Gabriel, Kœchlin, Charles and Dvořák, Antonín are other examples (we are a music school and our library’s holdings includes lots of music scores and sound recordings with names and titles in German, French, Czech, etc.)

This is very confusing to our patrons—they can’t find things they are looking for. Is there any way to fix this so diacritics are ignored?

----------------------------------------------------------------

Roy Rudolph

Director

Bakalar Library

Longy School of Music

1 Follen Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

tel.: 617-876-0956 ext. 1541

fax: 617-354-8841
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