[Koha] data import question

[Larry Stamm]

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

    > Is it true that the 016.9733 part of the 852h field (example
    > above) supposed to end up in biblioitems.classification and the
    > C475m part supposed to end up in biblioitems.subclass?

As Steven Baljkas already replied, yes.  I am mapping 082a to
biblioitems.dewy field and that seems to arrive in the database intact
too.  

    > When mapping the MARC subfield structure, is the "tab" parameter
    > used to extract multiple values from the same subfield?  For
    > example from above would the 016.9733 be subfield 852h tab0? and
    > C475m be subfield 852h tab1?  or am I misinterpreting the "tab"
    > parameter?

I think the tab parameter is more of a precedence value setter.  My
experiments seem to show that any MARC subfield set to -1(ignore) will
be ignored by bulkmarcimport.pl when parsing the import MARC file.  If
you want to map multiple MARC subfields to the same mysql table column,
then you can do so by selecting the same koha field from the drop down
menu and putting all tab values to the same (positive) value.  See the
default settings for the 100 author fields for an example.  I presume
you can do multiple mappings with one MARC field taking precendence over
the others by giving it a higher tab value, but I haven't tested this.

So I expect you will have to split your 852h data using other methods
than provided by Koha.  It is easy enough to extract just this field
using the MARC RTP program and then split it using awk or cut or any
number of other tools, but I have no idea how to write it back into a
standard MARC file.  Probably perl is the tool of choice for this.

    > I imported a small subset of my data using the mapping above (even
    > though MARC Check still reports the one error shown above) I now
    > get data in my items table in the database.  The problem I am
    > having now is that the biblioitems.classification field is NULL
    > for all my records even though it is mapped to 852h.

Check that the tab value for your biblioitems.classification field is
not -1(ignore).  Since this is the 852h subfield, this might be
generating the error message if it is not set to 10?

In addition, the tables bibliosubject, bibliosubtitle,
additionalauthors, itemtypes, possibly biblioanalysis, and probably a
few more tables need to be populated with MARC data for the koha search
and display functions to perform properly on an imported collection.
Bulkmarcimport.pl won't do this, AFAIK; you have to extract the data and
insert it into the mysql tables yourself, using the tools of your
choice.

Hope this helps.  I think it would be of value if somebody who has got
all this figured out to map each form field of the Koha html interface
to the Koha mysql table field from where the data is drawn.  Then it
would be easier to figure out how to map the MARC fields to Koha.


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