[Koha] Modifying Koha for a citation database, or, Hey folks, try this at home!

[King, Fred]

Esteemed Colleagues,

Some of you may be familiar with the MedStar Authors catalog, a Koha instance where I took citations from Medline, the database of medical journal citations run by the US National Library of Medicine and converted them to a format that could be seen and searched in Koha. I was new to Koha when I designed it, I didn't know what I was doing, and there were a lot of rough edges I wanted to polish in a future version. After much longer than I thought it would take, it's now available at http://www.medstarauthors.org.

So who would want to set up a Koha instance of local authors from Medline citations other than me?

>crickets<

Thought so. However, doing this project involved:

Deciding which Medline fields I wanted for the Authors Catalog.
Converting Medline citations in Reference Manager format to MARC records.
Adding new, non-standard MARC fields to the Koha framework.
Editing the OpacResults and OpacDetail xsl files to display the fields I wanted. There are a lot more than in the standard OpacDetail xsl!
Adding the new fields to Elasticsearch, and assigning them to indexes so they're searchable.
Editing masthead.inc to add more basic search options. (Institution 651$a, Department 656$a, etc.)
Editing opac-advsearch.tt to add more search options, and (when you click on "more options") even more search options.
Editing opac-facets.inc to modify the left column in the detail view.
Making it possible (and easy!) to add PDFs and other files to the Koha server itself.
Adding a page to the News function so I can display links to most of the files I've mentioned so far. (needs 22.11)
Putting a lot of data into a spreadsheet to keep track of what field is associated with what MARC tag, Elasticsearch index, etc.

Anyone working on, and being frustrated by, any of the above? Then you may find some of what I've done worth harvesting, at least to look at to see what I've done. It isn't necessarily pretty--XSLT programmers might need their fainting couches--but it works. At least for this installation.

Unfortunately, the site is blocked in some places outside the US, possibly in the EU because our IS department hasn't vetted it for GDPR compliance. (Thanks to David for suggesting the reason.) I think I can put the page with the files on a different server without running afoul of GDPR; I'll do it if anyone's interested.

--Fred

Fred King, MSLS, AHIP
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

You know it's cold outside when you go outside and it's cold.
--NPS Twitter

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