[Koha] Obtaining MARC21 records

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!

>
>BTW, has anybody written a script that would work through a list of 
>ISBNs and download the MARC records for them? 
>

The degreed librarians among us, myself included, have often been
critical of this behaviour. I'm afraid that *why* we don't do that sort
of thing has not been clarified to the extent that we ought to.
You really, really should go record by record through your collection
and actually evaluate each MARC record. MARC records can be extremely
detailed - and in most cases should be extremely detailed.
First, there ought to be notes with a good record. CDs come to mind. A
bad CD record will not have a note referring to the tracks on a given
musical CD. A good record will have each track title. This is useful for
patrons - highly so. Suppose I am looking for the song Magic Stick by
the rapper 50 cent. If I typed in Magic Stick to my catalogue, and the
MARC record I had for 'Get Rich or Die Tryin' had the notes, that record
would appear in the search listings. 
Further, a good MARC record for that would have an alternate author or
performer listing for Fifty Cent and perhaps even Fifty Cents for
patrons who try different spellings of the artist's name. It might even
carry Snoop Dog and L'il Kim. 
Numerical differences happen quite often in cataloguing. Janet
Evanovich's series come to mind. If a patron types in "10 Big Ones", you
want that entry in the alternate title field so that they pull it up. 
All of these points fall under the law "Save the time of the reader."
Sometimes that means taking more time on our end. I have seen some
terrible records in my short tenure - those that are missing a Title or
Author field where there ought to be. Were you to simply retrieve those
records automatically, you'd be stuck with those in your catalogue, and
have no means of knowing that they are there. 
So, I individually cull Fiction and Non Fiction adult records from the
Library of Congress (which is free) because those records tend to be
good. 
I individually cull Children's records from Access Pennsylvania or
perhaps Maine InfoNet.
I individually cull CDs and DVDs from Access Pennsylvania and Maine
InfoNet. I used to use Kansas City's catalogue, but alas, they no longer
allow MARC downloads for records.
Which brings me to this point - I would love for Koha to have an obvious
means of download of MARC records. Perhaps I like one of Stephen's
records. It would be great to be able to download that, like I can with
Library of Congress. If it does, I've obviously missed something, and I
apologise.
To sum up again, Z39.50 is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to
live there.

Brooke @ Hinsdale 
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