[Koha] Where do you get you cataloguing info from?

[baljkas at mb.sympatico.ca]

Tuesday, June 24, 2003	   23:40 CDT

Hi, Max!

Anne is certainly correct in pointing out those sources. You really
shouldn't have any problem downloading MARC records from LC. All the tools
are there, as Anne pointed out.

If you need an editing function, get the MARCEdit and MARCMaker/
MARCBreaker utilities (available for free) from the LC site, and you'll be
off and running. They really do work quite well, and afford batch
processing, too. If you need any help with them, just let me know and I'll
be glad to help.

As for free records, for anything American definitely try LC first. For
children's and juvenile literature, you are likely to get those 520
(summary) and 650 (subject) fields. (If you want to add uncontrolled --
i.e. non-thesaurus based -- terms specific to your local collection, you
can always code a 650 with indicator 1 blank, indicator 2 7, the term in
subfield a and the word 'local' in subfield 2.)

Two other good sources available are:

  • AMICUS - The National Library of Canada's free union catalogue
    service, which one can sign up for (don't worry: it is free and
    they don't seem ever to bother anyone with mail of any kind) via
    the login page at URL <http://amicus.nlc-bnc.ca/aaweb/aalogine.htm>
  • MAPLIN Global - so far (going on 6 years) a free parallel search CGI
    tool that will allow one to search for MARC records in up to 8 (more 
    realistic times-results with 4 or fewer) libraries at once, offered 
    by the Province of Manitoba (Canada) Public Library Services Branch.
    The URL is <http://maplin.gov.mb.ca/cgi-bin/dir.multi.cgi>
    For children's level materials, you might find (under Public) that
    North Toronto and WPL are good; you'll also be able to search your
    own National Library at the same time. When downloading, either
    choose a mnemonic name or number the files but remember to specify
    the file extension as .mar or something other than .cgi (which tends
    to throw most ILS)

I can't imagine a school library having as much free cash as Anne seems to
think is lying around. Before migration a few years back, one school
division in my home city had to pay over $100,000 CDN for retrospective
conversion of its union catalogue (ca. 20 schools), which isn't really that
cheap when you consider that each school's library team still had to
fine-tune (read: re-edit) all the records again anyway.

If your librarian finds downloading and re-editing too much a burden, try
soliciting for parent and adult volunteers and train apt students to
download records for editing. If you leave specific enough instructions,
the better volunteers may be able to do a good part of the editing even
(and there's always the MARCEdit program's script function to make global
changes fast, and you can create a simple template that can even be edited
with WordPad so you don't endanger the good data you do have with too many
untrained hands adding to the catalogue).

The last school library I worked at converted its entire collection (ca.
7,000 records) in less than 18 months using volunteers supervised by a
then-0.40 time librarian. Not bad and it didn't cost anything except the
people's willing time.

On a separate note ...

I don't know if it's just me, but Koha doesn't seem to mind different file
extensions for MARC records whereas other systems I've worked with fairly
freak if a file doesn't have the system specific designation. If you're
having trouble importing MARC records from any source, try saving a file
with a different file extension (.mar, .mrc, .mrk, get creative) and that
might do the trick. Just a thought.

Good luck with the MARC stuff, Max. In no time at all, you'll find it
annoyingly familiar. ;-)

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg  MB  CANADA