I am a retired librarian who has been helping libraries in several areas of
the world since my retirement 9 years ago. A contact in Central Asia
(Russian language region), Kathatarina, has sent me the queries below which
I am unabe to supply solutions. Can anyone help please? I'd be grateful
for any assistance.
<Part of my job is helping theological libraries in the former Soviet Union
to sort out their operations, and software is often something that they
cannot sort out themselves. Too big, too scary, don't know much about it,
not enough money. Several libraries have decided to migrate to Koha. At the
moment I'm helping a library in St. Petersburg to install and start using
Koha. They are part of the EAAA, the Euro-Asian Accreditng Associaton,
which is more about supporting each other rather than accrediting.
They are migrating from an ancient system and we have found no way to get
their data out of it, except by asking the company, who had sold them the
system 17 years ago, to export the data for a payment into the RusMarc
format. This is the official format in the country and it is a variation of
UniMarc. Now they have received the bib-records and we have imported them
into their Koha installation. Everything looks good so far, except the
'Items' didn't transfer. The company didn't put any data into the
900-fileds and the 'Items-page' isn't there. From what I understand the
'Items' page should create automatically, see Wiki at
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Holdings_data_fields_(9xx)? From data
that it takes from the 942 field? Some who use MARC21 also talk about 952,
which in UniMarc corresponds to 995. I'm sure you have migrated many data
before - what is your advice?
We will go back to the company and request that they fill the 900 fields,
but what if they don't do it? They say it is local information and this is
our responsibility.
I'm sure you're also familiar with MarcEdit. From what I've read, it is
possible to add fields using MarcEdit. Are you familiar with the process?
And is this something that we should revert to in case that the company
refuses to provide bib-records with 942 and 955 fields? Do you have
instructions/experience on how to do it?
The next question that came up is how to get the search to work. Even
though the data have been imported into Koha, search doesn't find anything.
So I assume this is something that needs to be fine-tuned on the server.
So far I'm connecting to their Koha installation using TeamViewer, next
week I'm traveling to St. Petersburg and hope that we can solve some of
these issues. But I know only the 'librarian' side of things, not the IT or
server side of things. I can do some settings but when it comes to the
server I'm lost (and their IT seems lost as well!). So if you could guide
us a bit from the distance, that would be great. I'm sure you could receive
access through TeamViewer as well. >
Lynn Pryor
lynntobias20(a)gmail.om
