[Koha] Barcode nightmare

[Mason James]

On 2010/01/4, at 11:24 PM, Mason James wrote:

>
> On 2009/11/17, at 5:10 PM, Seth Mayo wrote:
>
>> We are gradually getting everything together to move to Koha from
>> Alice.  Many of you will remember that back in July I was trying out
>> various library systems and decided that Koha was a great system to
>> get on board with.
>>
>> At this time of the year, the nitty-gritty of the system is going to
>> start getting looked at.  I have a few questions to ask regarding the
>> system but the most important one is:
>
>
>
> hi Seth.
>
>> Is there a way to force Koha to re-write barcodes on the fly?
>
> to me, thats the wrong way to approach your problem
> try to correct your barcodes *before* the import into Koha, and  
> save yourself some future pain.
>
> a small perl script to loop thru your bib file(s) and perform the  
> barcode correction will do the trick just fine
>
> preferably get your bibs from Alice as a big MARC file, then you  
> can use perl's MARC::Record module to do the heavy lifting.
>
> after the correction, import your bibs from the Koha->Tools->Import  
> gui, as usual ;)
>
> http://search.cpan.org/~mikery/MARC-Record-2.0.0/lib/MARC/Record.pm
>
> Mason.


ah, i just re-read your email and clicked to your actual problem ;)

you need to do something like...

- identify which existing barcodes are corrupt
- manually scan all the correct barcodes from the items in your  
collection, into a file (or db table) containing 2 fields for each  
item (a unique item-id  and the item's corrected barcode)
- loop thru your bib records and fetch the corrected barcode matched  
against that item's unique-id

its a bit fiddly, but fixable ;)

hope that helps,
Mason.