[Koha-devel] MARC::Record, record length and leader

[Julian Maurice]

On 10/04/2012 16:27, Jared Camins-Esakov wrote:
> Julian,
>
>     I know this is an old discussion but I just realized that saving a
>     biblio record longer than 99999 bytes result in a malformed leader.
>     Length of the record takes more than 5 characters and therefore
>     remaining characters in the leader are shifted to the right.
>     This cause the leader to have more than 24 characters.
>
>     I'm not sure of what have to be done. Should MARC::Record die when
>     encountering such a record? or should it force length to be 99999?
>     or should the record be truncated to fit the spec?
>     Has someone ever faced this problem? How did you handle it?
>
>
> MARC::Record should proceed blithely on, like Admiral Farragut at the
> Battle of Mobile Bay or the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.
> The record can still be serialized as MARCXML, and large records are not
> uncommon in the wild. As far as I know, the only way to handle it is to
> use MARCXML instead of iso2709.
>
> Regards,
> Jared
>

Ok, but the malformed leader is saved in the MARCXML, so it's displayed 
in the MARC editor, and cataloguing plugins marc21_leader.pl and 
unimarc_leader.pl won't work correctly.
Isn't there any workaround for this?

More than that, Koha is still generating malformed MARC records, and I 
think it's a problem for an ILS which is MARC-compliant.

-- 
Julian Maurice <julian.maurice at biblibre.com>
BibLibre