[Koha] SIRSI / Koha Differences

[Shell, Lezlie]

Hello!

We just installed Koha for testing and I'm having trouble orienting myself.  I'm the cataloger for Questia, an online library.  After a brief, frustrating flirtation with the Green one, I am really enjoying how neatly Koha fits with my current workflow.  We will be using Koha to store MARC records that I catalog.  None of it is customer facing.  Our Koha will feed some data into the Questia system (subject headings and publisher info), so I need to be able to point the data guys to the right tables.

I've been using SIRSI a long time (the clients had to be installed on OS/2 machines).  Since then, wherever I went, there it was.

After importing some records I fired up Brio to see where all the data lived, expecting to find some variation of the SIRSI catalog/marc0/item/callnum structure.  

After fleeing Brio I looked at the tables in SchemaSpy.  Does the MARC data really live in the marc field of the biblioitem table?  I tried to look at this in Brio, but it said I couldn't request a binary datatype.  I currently do a lot of data checking in the marc0 table.  I was hoping to find an equivalent table in Koha.

Can anyone help a recovering SIRSI user?  I need to wrap my head around how the MARC data is stored.

Thanks,
Lezlie