Derek Dresser wrote:

Quoting paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@free.fr>:

...

I'm playing with you file, and it seems at 1st glance to work well. I've a problem with 3 records : they have no ISBN neither ISSN. Here is 1 of the biblio (hard to read... just consider the 1st column is the tag : ISSN/ISBN are 020/022, and are not here) : 001 64066019 //r91 005 19910402164431.3 008 720420s1965 nyu b 00000 eng 040 _aDLC _cDLC _dDLC 043 _an-us--- 050 00 _aPN4855 _b.D3 082 00 _a071 100 10 _aDaniels, Jonathan, _d1902- 245 10 _aThey will be heard; _bAmerica's crusading newspaper editors. 250 _a[1st ed.] 260 0 _aNew York, _bMcGraw-Hill _c[1965] 300 _a336 p. _c22 cm. 504 _aBibliography: p. 325-330. 650 0 _aJournalism _zUnited States. 650 0 _aJournalists _zUnited States _xBibliography. 650 0 _aNewspaper editors _zUnited States _xBibliography. 650 0 _aNewspaper publishing _zUnited States. 740 1 _aAmerica's crusading newspaper editors. 852 1 _h071 D228t _p10048 961 _t6

do you confirm this, and what do you expect koha to do with such a record

?

Paul, Honestly, yesterday was my introduction to library circulation/card catalog systems. I guess what we are looking for is a web-based card catalog and circulation system. Our school network is Linux based, so I looked around for a open source solution with a web front end and found Koha. Probably the next step is for me to set up a prototype and import some data and let the librarian play with it.

While I was talking with the librarian yesterday, she did mention that some of the books were too old to have ISBN numbers. What would be the best way to deal with those? Would we generate our own, or is there a commonly accepted practice for dealing with that?

2 answers to your question : * in the new koha (will be ready in 2003, january), there is a (expected) nice way to manage MARC biblios : you put MARC files into a "breeding farm" until you need them (= you acquire the book). In this case, a ISBN/ISSN is needed to find the book. * if you plan to migrate a old DB into koha, then you need the bulkmarcimport tool which import YOUR library into koha. In this case, the ISBN is not needed. Note the bulkmarcimport already exists in the 1.2.x versions of koha.

One more question... We use openLDAP as our network directory service. Is Koha LDAP enabled? It would be great if we could use the existing accounts for checking books in/out.

Not yet. We are rewritting koha with a flexible auth system. When it will be done, it should be easy to add LDAP auth, as everything will be managed in a specific perl package, thus you can modify the package to use LDAP. -- Paul