[Koha] overlay records - Using MarcEdit

[Jason Ronallo]

On 3/9/07, Darla Grediagin <dgrediagin at bssd.org> wrote:
> MarcEdit does only work on windows at this point.  If you are a Mac Only
> organization (I work for one, I don't make the rules)  It was well worth
> the 500 dollars I spent on a pc laptop to use this program.

Thanks for the feedback. The command line version of MARCEdit to
break/make records works just fine under Linux with mono, but I eschew
mono and try to use open source when possible. For a short time I used
yaz-marcdump to convert back and forth between raw MARC and line
format, but recently I wrote a little script in perl using a
MARC::File module to convert records to a modified MARCMaker format
for editing. This way I can script a lot of the editing on batches. I
edit all my records outside of Koha before import including adding
holdings information. That's not really the problem.

What I'm wondering is if I have a record for an item in the system
already, can I edit the record outside of Koha and then overlay my
edited record over top of the one already in the system.  I'm
particularly wondering about this for batch editing and global
changes. If this is possible with bulkmarcimport.pl, what is matched
on to decide what record gets overlayed?  Many of the books I'm
cataloging are too old to have ISBN/ISSN/LCCN.

--Jason