[Koha] Import from Z39.50 - conversion MARC21 to UNIMARC - problem solved

[Himanshu Aggarwal]

I strongly believe that Koha should come up with a solution of converting
from Unimarc to Marc 21 otherwise we have to rely third party like Marcedit

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 3:27 PM René Seindal <rene at seindal.dk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm very new to Koha, so please excuse me if the following is obvious. I
> wasn't for me, and in case is isn't for others too, I'd like to share
> the information. That way it'll be in the mailing list archives for
> others to find.
>
> I've setup a Koha 22.11 instance for my wife, who's a librarian. I'm
> not.
>
> We're in Italy, so the instance uses UNIMARC, which allows for smooth
> interaction with the SBN, the Italian National Library System.
>
> A lot of our records are imported from the SBN, but not all. Some will
> have to come from LOC, British Library and others.
>
> If I searched LOC or BL (both of which use MARC21) for a record, there
> would be some results, but the titles, authors and ISBNs wouldn't appear
> in the search result. The only column visible was the Z39.50 server
> name. There were not error messages, just no data displayed.
>
> A click on a row, then selecting "Preview MARC" on the menu would show
> the record, but not in UNIMARC format.
>
> In my ignorance I expected Koha to do the conversion, after all there's
> a choice of format in the Z39.50 server configuration, but apparently it
> doesn't.
>
> Getting my head around this took a while, but in the end I found out
> that an XSLT conversion is needed, even though the displayed MARC
> records don't look like XML at all.
>
> There's an old bug report here:
> https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=6536
> which discusses the problem. It is marked FIXED and CLOSED.
>
> In there I found a tentative MARC21 to UNIMARC XSLT file which didn't
> work. My Koha instance gave me a "500 Internal server error".
>
> Searching a bit more, I found this by the author or MarcEdit:
> https://github.com/reeset/unimarc
> where there's another MARC21 to UNIMARC XSLT file that actually works:
>
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reeset/unimarc/master/marc21xml2unimarc.xsl
>
> The solution to my Z39.50 import from MARC21 servers into an UNIMARC
> Koha instance was to download the file from the link above, dump it
> unmodified in /etc/koha/sites/instance/marc21xml2unimarc.xsl and then
> put that path into the configuration of each individual Z39.50 server
> that uses MARC21.
>
> So at this point it works, we're happy, but I did expect Koha to take
> care of this. If not, why does it ask us to specify which MARC flavour
> the server uses, only not to act on the information?
>
>
> --
> René Seindal
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-- 
Assistant Librarian,
Confucius Institute Scholar 13-14,
R.D. National College,
Bandra (W.)