[Koha-devel] data import question & 008 use in Koha

[Christopher Curry]

Thanks, Magnus & Zeno, for your very useful replies.

Cheers,

Christopher Curry
Assistant Technical Librarian / Assistant IT Officer

American Philosophical Society
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Magnus Enger wrote:
> 2009/11/3 Christopher Curry <ccurry at 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
>   
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