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

[Ian Walls]

I'd advocate ISO-2709 only being an import/export format, and never using
it internally.  It's just got too many limitations, as we're seeing here.

On import, we check for valid leaders, and warn if not.

On export, we calculate the leader, and if it exceeds 99999, we warn.  We
can develop several options for dealing with this, like truncating to the
appropriate length, skipping the record or just exporting with an invalid
leader.

Cheers,


-Ian

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 11:05, Julian Maurice
<julian.maurice at biblibre.com>wrote:

> 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
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