Hi all, I want to improve the API(s) for importing (bibliographic) records. But I'm not 100% sure how to go about what criteria to use to gauge "improvement". Here are some ideas: * I think the REST API offers up one obvious addition and that's DELETE. It would be great to delete records using the API. I've found this mostly thanks to OAI-PMH where you get a notice when a record has been deleted upstream and needs to be deleted from Koha too. o The difficulty in deleting bibliographic records is items. If there are items, it blocks the delete. You could auto-delete items, but you can't if there are holds or if it's currently issued. At best, you could return a failed delete via the API, I think. * I keep thinking that "import profiles" could be a good way to go too. This might include a MARC Modification Template, it might be a XSLT, it might be a Koha::Filter. It would let you turns your incoming metadata from format A to format B. o This would also allow you to POST a minimum amount of data to the API. You'd have your metadata record and your import profile code. * The downside of this is the POST wouldn't detail the options for the import, and those imports would be more obfuscated. Changes to a profile could also impact subsequent imports unintentionally. o I'm not sure how batches would work with filtering. You might have 50/100 records filter correctly and import, but that leaves 50 which aren't imported. Do you undo the whole import, or do you fix your filter, and then re-import the first 50 alongside the first time import of the last 50? * The original metadata would be stored regardless of metadata format (e.g. marcxml, mods, rdf, dc, etc.) for historical purposes or to allow re-filtering in the event that a filter fails to correctly transform a record to valid MARCXML (or whatever internal metadata format Koha uses). * The import source and the type of import would be stored (ie http://oai-server.com and "oai-pmh", lx2.loc.gov and "z3950", <insert relevant source> and "oclc connexion", etc.). o I think this would be helpful for managing/processing a certain type of import, perhaps also in terms of matching records. o At the moment, with my work on #10662, I have a separate table "import_oai" which obviously is for records imported via oai-pmh only. I don't actually track the origin due to how I currently source the imports, but I could do it in the future. * Storing some sort of identifier would be good o OAI-PMH records have unique identifiers for the records o Z39.50. that's tougher since it's not a specific metadata format like the OAI-PMH format. So I don't know about this one. Anyway, these are just some ideas I've been having. They're not fully formed by any stretch of the imagination. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Direct: 02 8005 0595