[Koha] Connexion client alternatives

[King, Fred]

N.B.: Although I'm my library's cataloging department, I'm not a real cataloger and I add maybe 100 books per year to our collection. You should probably take that into consideration.

I use the web interface (connexion.oclc.org) to search and assemble my records. Then I download them to my computer, changing the .dat extension to .mrc, then convert them to text using MarcEdit's MARC Breaker. You could do further tweaking in MarcEdit, but for whatever reason I prefer to use Notepad. Then I recompile to .mrc using MarcEdit, upload to Koha, and take it from there. You could probably add the 952 field in Notepad/MarcEdit (I do that for my Authors' Catalog), but I add the item information after I've imported the records into the catalog.

Item labels: if those are what I call spine labels, you can do those in Koha from the Tools menu. You can configure a template (I have one for regular circulating books and another for books that need their collection code listed), then scan your barcodes into a batch, print the batch, and there you are. There's also a tool for printing just spine labels, but I haven't used that one. One problem I've had with the labels is that they tend to break lines in odd places. For example, what should be
   WD 130
   .AA1
   E78
   VOL 2
   1999
   
might come out as
   WD
   130
   .A
   A1
   E78
   VOL
   2 1999

Anyone have a solution?

As for creating records, on the very, very few occasions that I've had to create one, I've used the Cataloging > New Record > Default Framework function in Koha.   


Fred King
Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center
fred.king at medstar.net
202-877-6670
ORCID 0000-0001-5266-0279
MedStar Authors Catalog: http://medstarauthors.org

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-----Original Message-----
From: Koha [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Chad Roseburg
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2018 4:11 PM
To: partners at lists.bywatersolutions.com; koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Connexion client alternatives

It seems like the OCLC Connexion client has been orphaned over the past few years.
It's a pain to maintain/install and deal with and we're looking for alternatives from the post-1999 CE era.

Anyone using alternatives for creating/uploading/downloading records and printing item labels?
Is it possible to replace with MarcEdit?

Thank you!

--
Chad Roseburg
Assoc. Director / IT
Automation Dept.
North Central Regional Library
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