[Koha] [EXTERNAL] Re: Advice for how to update huge numbers of bib records, for former Millennium user

[Bales (US), Tasha R]

I really appreciate your reply Eric, thank you.  I will check out your link.  Alas, this is also a bit of a disaster.  I see my workload increasing.  ☺

If staff will be using SQL, I have reservations about unintentional changes or deletions.  Once a Report is created, are you just using SQL to change field data as well, or is there a different tool available that staff may use to actually apply their changes?

Thanks for your time,


Tasha R. Bales

From: Eric Phetteplace [mailto:ephetteplace at cca.edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2021 12:48 PM
To: Bales (US), Tasha R <tasha.r.bales at boeing.com>
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Koha] Advice for how to update huge numbers of bib records, for former Millennium user


EXT email: be mindful of links/attachments.




Hi Tasha,

We were also a former Millennium library that migrated to Koha, though it's been a while (migrated in 2016). Reports are essentially Millennium's "Lists" but they require more skill to create. So your example would need to be a SQL Report filtering according to the properties you've laid out (e.g. biblios not linked to the orders table, with item location in (X, Y, Z), biblio.author != 'AUTHOR', etc.).

I hosted workshops (here's a recording of one<https://youtu.be/K0zTu4qZ88c>) with our catalogers and other technicians on learning basic SQL and I write the more sophisticated reports for them. You can use runtime parameters to make the reports a little more flexible so that staff can adjust them to changing needs but they're not going to be able to accomplish much on their own without an understanding of SQL. I never use the guided reports in Koha and my memory of the few times I tried was that you couldn't accomplish anything substantial, but then again I prefer working in SQL anyways as it's so much more powerful than abstractions like Guided Reports or Create Lists.

Best,

ERIC PHETTEPLACE Systems Librarian, Libraries (he/him)

ephetteplace at cca.edu<mailto:ephetteplace at cca.edu> | o 510.594.3660 (cca)

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:(){ :|: & };:


On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 10:15 AM Bales (US), Tasha R <tasha.r.bales at boeing.com<mailto:tasha.r.bales at boeing.com>> wrote:
What would be the Koha equivalent to Millennium Create Lists* (or Alma Normalization Rules and Record Sets)?

So far, I see that lists and carts can be used to update records in Koha, but this seems to demand working with a pre-determined list of record numbers, or else by manually adding items to a cart.  What if I need to update a huge number of "unknown" records meeting specific criteria?

Can anyone suggest what the approach would be to accomplish an objective like this:

A non-administrator with limited technical skills needs to gather and update 40,000 bib records in Koha that can't be identified by any single unifying attributes.  My Millennium query might have looked like this:

*         Bib record not attached to order AND

*         (Location is Y or Location is X or Location is Z) and

*         Author is not TODD and

*         Note doesn't have FREE

*Millennium Create Lists allows you to create a Boolean Search, with up to about 20 statements, to query the entire database (various methods to search subsets or existing result sets also exist) and saves it to a file that can then be exported, or operated on (to apply global updates to fixed or variable fields, for instance).  No knowledge of SQL is needed.

Thanks in advance for any tips.  As an administrator, I could conceivably do this with SQL, but that's not feasible for cataloging staff.  We update large quantities of records all the time.


Tasha R. Bales
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