[Koha] Re: Questions about Koha

[Baljkas Family]

Wednesday, September 15, 2004     20:20 CDT

Hi, Amber, Joshua, et al.,

Depending on how fussy your standards are for the records that you get, Joshua's scripting solution may work well, but you may get some records that are real duds: all CAPS, title and statement of responsibility with errors, no imprimatur, no SH's, etc., etc.

I don't know if it's possible, but Joshua, if it is at all practicable, it **might be a good idea to write the script to reject records that are too short (less than 10 tags).** (If you are still in the beginning process of writing it, it might also be worth your while to check with Terry Reese; I vaguely remember a statement of willingness to share code with other open source-rs.) 

Amber, LC is pretty good with its catalogue (and you can access it for free!), so you shouldn't have too much trouble trusting the script for it. But be careful with other sources, including NLC (also free) which used contributing libraries' cataloguing without screening them for quality. There can be quite a bit of junk that will be pulled up just by an ISBN.

Also, please note, even with LC, sometimes the ISBNs are miscoded, so you may end up with what I was taught to call a false negative, where there is actually a record there, but it won't be pulled by a simple standard number search. Before coding a record from scratch, always check by title and/or author, just in case (this was standard practice at our local ISM, now an OCLC branch).

In terms of MARC, one little addendum to Dave Bigwood's excellent advice: **_Understanding MARC Bibliographic_ off of the LC main MARC page -- URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/> -- ** is a really nifty e-booklet that deals with pretty much everything, even getting into the actual structure of a record in part XI.

** The Concise Bibliographic format pages -- main page at URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdhome.html> --  detail the specs for each MARC field/tag and also provide LC examples of their proper use. ** Depending on your local cataloguing standards and budget concerns, that may be enough to spare you the expense of the MARC Format manual.

One further minor addition to Dave's super advice on retrospective conversion (almost verbatim what we were taught in library tech training here) from my experience and that of my instructors:
   Conversion is an excellent time to introduce useful new
   perks that will impress patrons and justify the process.

With the cataloguing, e.g., before you start, think about how detailed you want your records to be.

Think carefully about what notes and added entries you would have wanted to make, ones that would have helped and would help your patrons, but aren't practical when trying to economise space in a card catalogue. In MARC, they are just  extra lines of code.