[Koha] Adding Z39.50 servers

[René Seindal]

On 2023-03-13 09:03, library at ssst.edu.ba wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I must have missed that. That's a bummer, because I check that site 
> whenever I'm cataloging and in 90% of the cases they already have the 
> book I'm working on at that moment. It would have been easier to import 
> the MARC records instead of copy/pasting lines one by one into the 
> fields. Now I have to check if the British Library has the same 
> disclaimer, because I requester a password to access their servers!

Hi Aida Đikić

It can be done.

I have an old blog where I keep notes and things, and I wrote it down:
https://rene.seindal.dk/2023/02/23/koha-library-software/

Here's the relevant section, but the links didn't come over with 
copy-paste.



MARC flavours

There are several flavours of MARC records. The major ones are MARK21 
(or USMARC) and UNIMARC, but in Europe most countries seem to use some 
locally modified format of one or the other.

We’re in Italy, so I configured our Koha instance to use UNIMARC.

The problem with LoC and BL is, I discoved after a while, one of 
different MARC flavours. Our instance uses UNIMARC while LoC and BL use 
MARC21.

Koha doesn’t convert from one format to the other when you import a 
record. Koha does ask you when you configure a Z39.50 server, which 
format the server uses, but it still doesn’t convert the data.

This took me a while.

MARC records are not XML, but in the X39.50 server configuration there 
was a fields for custom XSLT files. Maybe Koha worked internally with 
MARCXML which is an XML representation of a MARC record?

Apparently lots of libraries use a program called MarcEdit to do this 
conversion between MARC flavours. It is written by a Terry Reese, and lo 
and behold if he didn’t have such “MARC21 to UNIMARC” XSLT files on 
Github.

I downloaded his marc21xml2unimarc.xsl file, copied it to my VPS, 
entered the pathname in the Z39.50 server configuration, and suddenly my 
imports from LoC and BL worked perfectly.

-- 
René Seindal