[Koha] Let Unimarc and USmarc work together

[MJ Ray]

"Peter Zhao" <peterzhaonj at 163.com>
>            Koha is a wonderful library system. The current version
>            just allows to choose either UNIMARC or USMARC. How can
>            let Koha support to choose both UNIMARC and USMARC? I
>            hope the future version can let more option on marc
>            framework. Thanks a lot.

You can't do both at the moment.  I don't remember any current work on
it, but I think there's at least three possible approaches that could
change that:

1. Koha allows multiple Koha-to-MARC mappings and let each record
declare which mapping to use, but I suspect that will cause lots of
problems;

2. Koha maps MARC21 and UNIMARC to something (maybe MARC21 or UNIMARC?
Has this been done by any librarians?), use that as the internal
structure and then transform every record as it goes in or out of
the system;

3. we map imported records to the chosen MARC structure and don't
worry about preserving all the detail of the original.

Would librarians or other developers have comments on these or other
possible approaches, any relevant bugs, RFCs or rumoured work, and the
abilities of Zebra and Solr to handle multiple MARC structures?

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/