[Koha] importing, marc mapping, progress

[Steven F. Baljkas]

Sunday, August 1, 2004    20:34 CDT

Hi, Scott,

I have the answer to at least a few of your questions, and your questions
point to something I was trying to understand about how Koha handles MARC,
so hopefully I'll end up with an answer to one of my questions, too.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Scriven" <koha-main at toykeeper.net>
To: <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>
Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2004 8:26 PM
Subject: [Koha] importing, marc mapping, progress


> Hello.
>
> I've been slowly building a path to migrate data from various
> data sources into koha, and am now at the point where I want to
> improve the translation.
>
> My process so far is this:  I'm dumping data to MODS format, and
> converting to MARC XML with some LoC stylesheets.  After that, I
> can convert to binary MARC with the perl MARC::File::XML package,
> and import into Koha with its bulk import script.  I've had to
> modify the LoC stylesheets somewhat, and will need to modify them
> more, but otherwise the existing tools have worked okay.
>
> I've noticed a bit of data loss going into Koha.  For example, I
> can't find the series title anywhere, even though it's in the
> marc database as field 440a, and is mapped to biblio.seriestitle.
> It seems to work during searches, but is never displayed.  Is
> this a template problem?

This is one of the things I was concerned about: how Koha handles the data
from MARC records. Stephen, Joshua, other cognoscenti: is Scott's problem
here because of a mapping error? something that needs to be defined in MARC
parameters?

> If possible, I'd also like to populate the koha inventory during
> import.  Can I set a 9xx field to indicate the number of items in
> stock, and create other similar koha-specific data that way?