[Koha] Koha for beginners

[King, Fred]

Hi Mehvish, and welcome to Koha. I tried to explain MARC tags to my mother last night and she fell asleep. I think that being in a hospital emergency room late at night right after a hefty dose of Dilaudid may have had something to do with it... (She'll be okay, BTW.)

MARC is complicated, but makes sense after a while. Think of all the various ways you can describe a book, musical recording, film, etc. Author, publisher, year published, length, ISBN, ISSN, call number... well, you get the idea. Now give each element a number. For example, the title goes in the 245 field. The main part of the title goes into 245$a. If the book is "Arnold. The tale of a chipmunk" the second part goes into 245$somethingelseicantrememberbutmigjtbeb. Do that for every element you want to describe and you got yourself a MARC record. You don't have to do original cataloging on everything; see OCLC and Z39.50. I'm typing this on my iPhone so I'll let someone else explain those--my thumb is getting weary.

One thing I love about Koha is that it's infinitely customizable (yes, literally). If you want to add or change something, you can. All the real catalogers just turned green upon reading that, but you can.

I'm away from work right now and I'm astonished that I can get email at all, but I can follow up next week if you want.

Have fun with Koha,

Fred King
Fred.king at medstar.net



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-----Original Message-----
From: Mehvish Farah [mehvishfarah at gmail.com<mailto:mehvishfarah at gmail.com>]
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2016 01:25 PM Eastern Standard Time
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Koha for beginners


Hi,
I am new to Koha and have no library science experience.
I am trying to understand MARC but stuck at the terms where there are some
numbers with a dollar sign and then an alphabet. What is this basically?
I would be grateful if someone can help me with a book or link that helps
understand these terms or library/koha terms in general or in easy
comprehension.

other thing that i want to know is if a book is bilingual (Spanish and
English or Arabic and English) , what should i write in Lnaguage code clumn?

Thanks
*Mehvish*
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