[Koha] Scripting the Overnight Authorities job.

[Raymund Delahunty]

Our library is working hard to have really tight authority control and one of the services we use is an “Overnight Authorities” one provided by a bibliographic data service company. At appropriate intervals (currently meaning “when I get around to it” ) we send our newly created or updated bibliographic records to the data services company, and within some hours receive two data files back. The first is the biblios (changed in some minor ways, including some RDA work done, I recall) and the second is a file of new authority records for the headings in the biblios sent. Both files are imported and when the authority linker runs every week, the biblios are placed under authority control.
So far I have been doing all the data extract, data transfers and biblio overlaying and new authorities imports manually, but I want to significantly increase the frequency of using the service, and I am looking at scripting the tasks, and adding them to the crontab. Sadly my scripting skills have deteriorated to non-existent and I have contacted our support company. They have advised that none of their customers do anything like this and they are not aware of any other Koha users with a similar requirement. But surely there are customers who do have this requirement- my impression is that at least in the UK, authority control is very uncommon (non-existent?) in Koha, but internationally there must be many Koha users using a similar “overnight” service like this. We have no funds available for the scripting development work, and also it seems unnecessary to “reinvert the wheel” if the scripts have already been written and might only need a few local edits to automate the currently manual series of tasks. Is anyone able to assist me with this?
Ray Delahunty
University of the Arts London
r.delahunty at arts.ac.uk<mailto:r.delahunty at arts.ac.uk>

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