[Koha] Hi from a total Koha beginner

[Indranil Das Gupta]

Hi Gianfranco,

please find my answers in-line.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 5:57 PM, Gianfranco Nicola/MFP
<gianfranco.nicola at museoferroviariopiemontese.com> wrote:
> Hi Robin,
>
> Thank you for your answer. In fact, i am just going to extract
> as much data as possible from the legacy database (which is
> SQL Server) as a CSV file, then I will try convert it as a MARC
> file. In Italy, National Libraries use UNIMARC, so I configured
> my Koha instance that way.

I'll try to answer some of your queries. First off, I've never worked
with UNIMARC, rather with MARC21. So I'm going to refer to MARC21.
Having said that, UNIMARC is a flavour of MARC so, there are enough
similarities in the concepts.

> For example: the old program associates each book with one
> or more topics (like "steam engines"; "steam locomotive boiler
> parts"; "signalling"; "traffic control", and so on); where are to be
> stored these topics in koha?

In MARC21, these would go into "subject heading"s  i.e. under tag no
650 - http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd650.html

> But right now I am wondering if these informations _should_
> ever be transferred, because - if I understand right - these topics
> relates to "classify" a book, whereas registering it in the catalog
> is just that: "cataloguing" it. And , if I am right, Koha catalogues
> pre-classified books, and doesn't allow to classify a a book from
> scratch. Is that right? If not, how to do that?

No, Koha does allows a book to be cataloged from scratch. You would
need to define the authority files ahead or else go on defining them
as you go along. Either is possible.

> Another question is, in the old database books and authors
> are linked by a many-to-many relation; so, when extracting
> records, this gives multiple rows in the CSV, each with a
> different author;  the same with publishers.  How can I handle this?

The way I would do it would be stage these into mysql tables. Write a
perl script that accesses these tables, and extracts the JOINed data
and finally save it a a MARC record using some of the same MARC
modules that Koha uses. Then run a final check on the created MARC
files using an utility like MarcEdit. And finally when satisfied with
the same, do a bulk import into Koha.

hope that helps
-indranil


-- 
Indranil Das Gupta
L2C2 Technologies
INDIA

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