[Koha] data import question

[Larry Stamm]

Derek Dresser <Derek.Dresser at gouldacademy.org> writes:

   
    > Is there an already defined option to extract the "item" data from
    > the MARC 852 field (I believe from some responses that I have
    > received that this is a fairly standard location for the "item"
    > data).  Any help or additional information would be appreciated.
    > Perhaps there is a way for me to rewrite my MARC data so that that
    > information will be read properly?

Hi Derek,

No, you have to define the mappings from the marc fields to the items
table yourself.  This is done in from the Koha intranet interface, going
to the Parameters link, and then to the "Links Koha-MARC DB" link, and
then to the items tab from the drop-down menu.  Then you start mapping
the koha items table column names to MARC subfields.

Note that _all_ of these mappings have to be in the subfields of the
same MARC field, so that if you are using the 852 field (as our library
is) then all the needed items table columns will need to be mapped to
852 subfields.

The mapping that I am trying at the moment is:

items.itemnumber -> 852 f (arbitrary mapping - no data in this subfield
in the original MARC record of our old system )

items.multivolumepart -> 852 m
items.barcode         -> 852 p
items.dateaccessioned -> 852 8
items.homebranch      -> 852 a (arbitrary mapping)
items.price           -> 852 9
items.itemnotes       -> 852 z
items.holdingbranch   -> 852 b (arbitrary mapping)

Your mappings might have to be slightly different depending on where
your current MARC records are storing data.  Since many of our library's
records were entered by hand, I am having to "fix and reconstitute" the
MARC database to standardize the entries.  This is not proving to be an
easy job to catch every error.

The rest of the columns in the items tables are left unmapped for now.
In addition, you have to go to the "MARC tag structure" link under
Parameters and change the tab value of all the subfields used in the
items table to "items(10)", except for the tab value of items.itemnumber
which should be set to "-1(ignore)" since this value will be
autoincremented by the bulkmarcimport script and should not read any
values that might inadvertently be in your MARC records that you are
trying to import.

Then go back to the main Parameters page, and click the "MARC Check"
link.  This will check all your MARC-Koha mappings to see if they are
valid. If there are errors, it will point them out and you need to fix
them before trying to use the bulkmarcimport script.  Once you get an
error free message from "MARC-Check", then you should be good to use
bulkmarcimport.  Remember to use the "-d" option to delete the previous
entries.

Once you get the biblio data into the items tables, the circulation data
from your old system can be extracted and added to the table if you
want.  You will probably have to write your own script to automate this,
since each library system seems to store its circulation data in a
lightly different fashion.

I find the bulkmarcimport script to be interminably slow, entering only
about 6000 items per hour on our 950 MHz CPU server running Mandrake
9.0.  It is not much slower on my 266 MHZ home machine that I am using
as a test machine.  Because I have to enter all 15,000 items from our
collection to really test for errors in my MARC "munging", it means
another 2 1/2 hr wait to load up all the items again after fixing a
mistake before testing.  I might get frustrated enough to try my hand at
writing a faster upload script...

-- 
Larry Stamm, Chair
McBride and District Public Library
McBride, BC  V0J 2E0
Canada
http://www.mcbridebc.org/library

.