[Koha-devel] Plugin Development

[Charles Athey]

This is my first post to this list. I am a retired computer scientist with development and system administration experience. I used PERL a lot about 25 years ago but haven’t done much with it since until now. I recently deployed Koha at the Sacramento FamilySearch Center where I volunteer. The Sac FSC is an archival library, meaning we don’t allow books to be checked out. We have and are digitizing our collection of copy protected books. Public domain books are being digitized and the physical book and the digital copy are sent to the FamilySearch organization to be added to their system. They are also using Koha but our Center’s instance is separate. We are making the PDFs of copy protected books available on-site ONLY, no internet access at this point, and are storing the books for preservation and space reasons.

We had a need to update the MARC 856 data fields to reflect the location of the PDFs of our books. I looked at the plugin AddURLsToMarc by Tomás Cohen Arazi. It didn’t have quite enough capability as we wanted to update a few more of the subfields. I decided to make a plugin based on AddURLsToMarc that I made more general and added functionality to allow arbitrary MARC data fields to be added or deleted. It is working very well.

So, the questions are
  - What is the process for sharing such plugins with the Koha community, are there conventions that are used, etc.?
  - Is this the right forum to ask these questions?
  - Can users running other version help testing the plugin? I have only tested it on 23.05.05 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Our plugin is titled UpdateMarcField and I have put it on GitHub in my koha-plugin-updatemarcfield <https://github.com/athey3/koha-plugin-updatemarcfield> repository.

I have used local Git extensively for personal code but have only accessed GitHub not posted items on it prior to this as most things I have worked on have been proprietary. 

Any and all advise is appreciated.

Chuck Athey
Asst. Directory for Technology
Sacramento FamilySearch Center
athey3 at gmail.com
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