The section on Koha is particularily interesting to us going forward I think. -pate ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 16:02:26 -0400 From: Brian Cassidy <brian@nald.ca> To: oss4lib-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [oss4lib-discuss] MARC -> RDBMS Hello again, Thanks to everyone for their quick replies! Here's what I've done since yesterday: I looked into the 'Koha' library software. It looks interesting, but the line "It is currently possible to import MARC records, one at a time." turned me off of it, due to the fact that I have several repositories with thousands of records each. I looked into Michael Doran's concerns, but the powers that be want me to steer away from a Z39.50 interface. So, that's as far as I got with that. :/ After looking at the document (http://www.openisis.org/openisis/doc/RdbConv) provided by Ferran Jorba, I created a simple DB structure (pardon my ASCII :) .---------. .-----------. | item | | marc_data | ----------- ---- ------------- | item_id | | item_id | ----------- | data | | ------------- | /|\ .-------------. | tag_data | --------------- | item_id | | tag_order | | tag | | indicator_1 | | indicator_2 | | subfield | | data | --------------- Note: marc_data.data is just a 'blob' of the MARC record. I then used MARC::Record (Hi Ed.) to quickly write a couple perl scripts to generate some SQL and run the queries. My database now has 2002 (MARC) records in a somewhat useable structure. For instance, I can now say SELECT item_id FROM tag_data WHERE tag = '008' AND data LIKE '%fre__' to get all of the IDs of the French records. I'm now at the point where I need to create a data crosswalk (as Art mentioned) so I can display the data in a human readable way, as well as facilitate easy searching. The Dublin Core crosswalk (http://www.loc.gov/marc/marc2dc.html) on the loc.gov website (hat tip: Art) seems like a great standard to follow. The problem that I'm now facing is that frequently, data in a tag is split up into many subfields. For instance: SELECT item_id, subfield, data FROM ust_tag_data WHERE tag = '245' -- Title ORDER BY item_id One of my results is: item_id | subfield | data ------------------------------------------------------------- ... 2 | a | Keeping Alberta competitive : 2 | b | success through workplace learning. -- ... Now, it's totally doable to loop through the results (in perl, ASP, etc) and concatenate the data together. This COULD, however, get tedious depending on the number of fields I need to look at. This is probably the wrong forum to ask, but would anyone have any suggestions on how to proceed (or perhaps takes some steps back and attack it differently)? Thanks again for all your help! -Brian Cassidy (brian at nald dot ca) http://www.gordano.com - Messaging for educators. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility Learn to use your power at OSDN's High Performance Computing Channel http://hpc.devchannel.org/ _______________________________________________ oss4lib-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oss4lib-discuss see also http://www.oss4lib.org/