[Koha] Data Conversion - Windows-centric, sorry

[baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca]

Thursday, October 2, 2003     14:09 CDT

Hi, Stephen, Luke, et al.

Re: the MARC tool I had referred to and your response ...

Stephen Hedges <shedges at skemotah.com> wrote:
>baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca said:
>
>> As I have posted to the listserv several times, there is a VERY NEAT
>> and FREE program available off of the Library of Congress MARC ...
>> Tools page at
>>     URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html#recordtools>
>> called MARCEdit. You will also need to download the free tools
>> MARCMakr (and MARCBreaker) from the same page. [snip]
>
>I have not used this tool (because it *really* requires Windows, won't
>work on anything else), ... 

I must apologise and plead guilty to being Windows-centric. I am sorry. In
my defense, I think that what one comes to find as standard in a workplace
tends to become what one thinks everyone has access to, too.
Again, my apologies for not thinking about that incompatibility issue.

I don't know if it's possible, but maybe people can run the MARCEdit
program on other systems. My younger brother assures me that there is a way
to run Windows programs on Mac platforms (he does this at home and at
work), and my best friend has some kind of Windows simulator for his Linux
system at home.

Otherwise, I still would be willing to help out people on a case-by-case
basis in record conversion, at least in the short term.

Also: I don't know that this will help, but from the Programmer's section
of the Help in MARCEdit there is this blurb (which does get back to the
need for PERL which many of you programmer types will doubtless be more
familiar and comfortable with than MARC):

=======================================================================
MarcEdit and PERL:

Description:

Though MarcEdit is soley a Windows application, PERL afficiondoes can still
make use of the MarcEngine, so long as they have PERL installed on their
Windows machines. To use any of MarcEdit's functions, all one has to know
is that the MarcEngine is a COM object, so calls to the MarcEngine must be
made using PERL's COM syntax.  For an example of this, see below:

PERL Example Code:

use strict;
use Win32::OLE;

my $obj_MARC = Win32::OLE->new('Marc21.MarcEngine')
or die "Cannot start Marc21 Object.\n";

my $lret = $obj_MARC->MarcFile('c:\\documents and
settings\\reeset\desktop\\main.mrc','c:\\documents and
settings\\reeset\\desktop\\mainc.mrk');

print "$lret\n";

More Information:

For more information on PERL and Windows in general, please see the
ActiveState website at http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/. For
more information on MarcEdit in general, feel free to contact the author at
terry.reese at oregonstate.edu.

================================================================= 


> ... but from the description it sounds like you would still need to
> know some basic MARC, like tag 245 subfield a is the place for the
> title, in order to use the Delimited Text Translator. Or does it have
> enough help to walk the users through the MARC stuff?

Regarding this, your second point, Stephen: sorry, again.

No, MARCEdit doesn't provide a guide to the MARC field structure or
appropriate tags. Like me, it assumes that people working with the program
would know MARC. In my defense, there, I would add that I did write Luke
off-listserv with a mapping and referred him to the full Library of
Congress Bibliographic Format online resource page for further detail.

There are various introductions online to MARC format but probably the best
is from the LC site again, under the link _Understanding MARC
Bibliographic: Machine-Readable Cataloguing_, subsection MARC21 Reference
Materials - Part VII. A Summary of Commonly Used MARC21 Fields, at

   URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/um07to10.html#part7>

which gives brief descriptions of the top 10% of the fields (the ones
occurring most often) and their format. The whole of that section would be
an excellent resource to consult before data conversion, especially for
programmers/sys admin folk unfamiliar with MARC but taking on the task of
retroconversion of an old database to MARC.

Again, on a case-by-case basis, I would be more than willing to help people
figure out their record-mapping requirements for conversion. There's very
little I can do in terms of Koha development, but at least I can help with
this peripheral level of support.

I think the link to that UMB section above should more than suffice, but if
Pate or any of the other Koha experts think it would be worthwhile, I could
put together a rough guide to mapping data fields to MARC for the wiki/koha
site. Someone 'in charge' can let me know at his/her convenience.

Again, Stephen, et al., my apologies. I hope the above does help somewhat.

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA