[Koha] A barcode question

[Steven F.Baljkas]

Tuesday, June 6, 2006     00:15 CST

Dear Heidi, et al.,

I have actually been thinking about your question since last Tuesday when -- while editing/fixing records converted from an Excel spreadsheet into tagged MARC format using MARCEdit (an excellent tool BTW available off the LC MARC Records, Systems and Tools page at
    URL <http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html>) --
it dawned on me that I was going to have a hell of a time trying to get barcodes into the right places once I had everything else with the records neatened up.

(BTW Venkat, if you are reading mail on the general list, it is your records I have been working on; lots of problems I'll brief you on in due course.)

In any case, the thought I had was that it might be possible to export the MARC tagged format into a delimited text format and then ***import that into Excel or another program that could generate field code automatically*** (I lack the ability to write scripts to perform such "automagical" feats, although I am sure that is another, probably better solution). I think Excel could do this. It would only be a matter of deciding what structure the barcodes would need to have and their length.

Once the barcodes were added into the correct field, I think it would be possible to go back across the bridge as it were, export them again as delimited text, receive them into MARCEdit for checking and then convert them into true MARC.

At the very worst, Heidi, I have spent a little more than a week working on the records for Venkat, and while I couldn't assign barcodes, I was reassigning a lot of accession numbers and correcting errors in call numbers, easily more than 6000 in the 12793 records edited. It is a pain to do it all manually, but it is feasible for one persistent cataloguer to add barcodes manually if need be.

For the record, it would be great if Koha could automatically generate the barcodes and really super if it could know where to insert these in the MARC records (since it can export MARC it must somehow 'know'), e.g. 852 $p and 952 $p. Perhaps a customisable, Koha-flavour-based add-on to shoot for sometime in version 3.x.x?

As for printout of barcodes, Heidi, wasn't there something on the listserv a week or two back, around the same time as some discussion on spine labels? I remember Joshua had reported on some progress a little while back.

IIRC someone once commented that you could extract the data directly from the MySQL database to do what you are desiring, Heidi. That is, IIRC ...

Anyway, HTH a little.

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


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From: "h lowe" <heidilowe at gmail.com>
Date: 2006/06/05 Mon AM 10:14:13 CDT
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] A barcode question

First of all, thank you for your time, and i apologize if this question has
been asked before. I didn't find in the 2005 or 2006 archives, but I may
certainly have missed it. But, here is my question:
I am helping a smallish library (about 6,000 volumes) migrate to Koha.
We already have an online catalog, so to speak, but no barcodes,
circulation, or any of that.
Basically our plan is to export the records from the old catalog into MARC
format and import into Koha using the bulkmarcimport.pl . We would like the
Koha to automatically generate barcodes and print them with our own printer.
However, in the user guide it says we must have marc support turned off to
automatically generate barcodes. Is this still true?
We need to use MARC-21. So if we cannot automatically generate barcodes I
would like to know, so that we can plan to buy pre-printed ones instead (if
we must).
Ideally, what we would like to do is have the barcodes print with the call #
on the bottom, and be printed in call number order (like a shelf list of
barcodes?) I would also like to know if this is possible.
Thank you very much in advance,
Heidi Lowe

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