[Koha] Obtaining MARC21 records

[Steven F. Baljkas]

Wednesday, December 8, 2004    20:15 CST

Hi, Christopher,

With a hearty "amen" to all that Brooke had to say, one does have to concede that there have been (successful?) attempts to use automated scripts to hunt for bibliographic records by ISBN (I don't think ISSN was included in any efforts, unless I missed something).

Way back on August 12, 2003, John Voth wrote in with the following:

>> Howdy!
>>
>>I've developed a couple of programs that I have used to
>> aid me in populating the library database.
>>
>>The first program takes a raw scan of a book's EAN
>>(i.e. 9781575212784) and converts it into the ISBN
>>(i.e. 1575212781).
>>
>>The second program takes a list of ISBN's and attempts to
>>retrieve the MARC record for each title from the LoC.
>>
>>I have successfully used these two programs to obtain MARC
>>records on approximately 4000 titles so far. I think it
>>took about 40 minutes to poll the LoC and save all the
>>responses to a file.
>>
>>The only program I need to find/write/beg/borrow/steal is
>>one that will take all these MARC records and import them
>>into KOHA. Is there anything out there that does this
>>already?

[ed. note: I believe the answer to that was the bulkmarcimport script]

So, while I agree with everything Brooke said, I have to confess that I should have those programs from John somewhere on the HD and I could dig them up for you if you are truly unwilling to consider doing the cataloguing in what the professionals and paraprofessionals in library science know and advocate to be the best way, record by record. Just let me know.

On another topic: I remember your name from a while back but I cannot remember what kind of school library you're working at (I am sorry if that seems obvious to others on the listserv, but in case people have forgotten, we've had theological seminary libraries referred to as "school" collections so I'd rather be clear). I would have some alternate suggestions for you if we are truly talking about a K-12 school library, ones that would provide more and better notes than LC tends to provide for Children's and Young Adult lit.

As for the virtual shelves: I had the same question a while back. IIRC, the answer is that it is basically a way of setting up a bibliographic list, like for reserved books for a course or project.

Anyway, I hope some of this helps. I'll dig up the programs from John if you want. In the meanwhile, I hope your efforts with Koha go well.

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada

> From: "Christopher M. Jones" <cjones at partialflow.com>
> Date: 2004/12/08 Wed PM 08:22:30 CST
> To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> Subject: Re: [Koha] Obtaining MARC21 records
> 
> Thanks for the great help. I'll check those out when I have a chance
> tomorrow at school.
> 
> BTW, has anybody written a script that would work through a list of
> ISBNs and download the MARC records for them?
> 
> I have another question, unrelated to the first. What are virtual
> shelves? I don't see the concept explained in any of the documentation.
> 
> 
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