[Koha] Obtaining MARC21 records

[Bigwood, David]

Christopher,

Building a catalog of your collection does require every record to be evaluated. It is very labor intensive. There are some commercial services that will take a list of ISBNs, LCCNs or titles and authors and match on those access points. Marcive has a good reputation. Not free.

Is there a consortium of libraries you could join? You might be able to get access to resources at a discount. Check with your state library and state education agency.

I have made our catalog available for download, lpi.mrc. It might not match your collection but it may be useful in testing. The readme file describes the record set. ftp://www.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/bigwood/

Another source of a large number of records, but without holdings and very bare is cufts2marc at http://lib-cufts.lib.sfu.ca/CUFTS/cufts2marc-list.cgi Again, may be useful for testing.

Sincerely,
David Bigwood
bigwood at lpi.usra.edu
Lunar & Planetary Institute
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/whats_new.shtml





-----Original Message-----
From: koha-admin at lists.katipo.co.nz
[mailto:koha-admin at lists.katipo.co.nz]On Behalf Of Christopher M. Jones
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 5:13 PM
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Obtaining MARC21 records


I have been playing with Koha some, trying to work out how it works so
we can start using it at my school. My question is about sources for
bibliographic records. What is the best (free) way to get a set of
biblios to populate the catalog, so that we don't have to look up every
item individually, either manually entering data or searching for items
through the z3950 search? 

I see that subscriptions and ftp downloads are available from the LC,
but the prices here are prohibitive. Is there anyhwere to download large
numbers of records in large files to be imported into Koha?

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