[Koha] importing, marc mapping, progress

[Stephen Hedges]

Scott Scriven said:

> I see that now, mapped already to biblio.abstract.  However, it
> is marked as non-repeatable.  Is it safe to change that?

So long as Library of Congress says it's OK to repeat a tag, then you're
"officially" OK.  However, be aware that Koha -- with the exception of
subjects -- will only store the first instance of the tag in the Koha
tables.  (In other words, all the tags will be stored in the MARC tables,
but only one will be stored in the Koha tables.)

>> On another note (pardon pun), someone was asking me recently
>> whether, if you did a search for a particular work, say by
>> title, whether the author (and other, e.g. subject, possibly
>> title, fields) would come up in Koha as 'hyperlinked', if there
>> were other works by that author. This is something that Voyager
>> does and it is very handy for patrons and staff alike.
>
> Koha seems to do this somewhat already, but I hope to extend it
> to more fields.

This would just be a matter of creating links in the template, similar to
the way the OPAC handles subject links.

> I'm unsure how to handle subtitles.  I'm not sure how Koha's
> "title" and "unititle" differ.  It sounds like one would list the
> full title, and the other would do the same without "the" and
> such prepended.  Is there a way to map biblio.title to 245a + 245b?

In the latest "unstable" scripting of Koha that Nelsonville is using for
its OPAC, the non-indexed characters (e.g. "the" and "a") as defined by
the indicators in the MARC record are used to provide a "true"
alphabetical title list -- see http://koha.athenscounty.lib.oh.us.  The
"unititle" would be a "uniform title" that differed from the title on a
particular edition of a work.  For instance, the title on the book may be
"John Doe's Ward and Piece," but the standard (uniform) title for the book
is "Ward and Piece."

BTW, notice also that NPL is now listing _all_ of the notes from all of
the MARC note fields on the OPAC detail page.  Once we get the code a
little cleaner and more universal (so it works for UNIMARC or no-MARC
libraries), we'll be committing it to CVS.   NPL is also looking into
doing the same thing with all of the MARC subject tags, thus bypassing the
Koha tables to pull information directly from the MARC tables.

Stephen

-- 
Stephen Hedges
Skemotah Solutions, USA
www.skemotah.com  --  shedges at skemotah.com