Thanks, Magnus & Zeno, for your very useful replies. Cheers, Christopher Curry Assistant Technical Librarian / Assistant IT Officer American Philosophical Society 105 South Fifth Street Philadelphia, PA 19106-3386 Tel. (215) 599-4299 ccurry@amphilsoc.org <mailto:ccurry@amphilsoc.org> *For technical support, please use helpdesk@amphilsoc.org <mailto:helpdesk@amphilsoc.org>* Main Library number: (215)440-3400 APS website: http://www.amphilsoc.org Magnus Enger wrote:
2009/11/3 Christopher Curry <ccurry@amphilsoc.org>:
Hello all,
We're in the middle of migrating MARC data to Koha. We tried importing serials data into Koha and a record that had 1900+ items attached did not import. I found the record and tested importing it, removing items until it would import and found out that 1238 was the maximum number of items I could import with one MARC record. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to configure the import to accept more items?
I used bulkmarcimport.pl on Koha 3.0.1, running on Debian Lenny.
I think you are running into one of the limitations that the MARC format inhertited from the days when magnetic tape was the cool new thing...
"Record length (character positions 00-04 [in the leader]), contains a five-character ASCII numeric string equal to the length of the entire record, including itself and the record terminator. The five-character numeric string is right justified and unused positions contain zeroes (zero fill). ***The maximum length of a record is 99999 octets***." (My attempt at emphasis.) http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/specrecstruc.html#genrec
And if you have enough items you reach that limit in size.
I have this same problem with one of the records i tried to import for my client #1 - my plan is to try and transform the record to MARCXML, which does not impose arbitrary limits on the size of a record, and import that with the "-m MARCXML" option for bulkmarcimport.pl.
Regards, Magnus Enger libriotech.no