Re: [Koha-devel] Question...

[Tonnesen Steve]

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Nicholas Stephen Rosasco wrote:

> INSTALL as in the text used to give the directions, or INSTALL in the
> sense of the make/install/etc scripts.

I promised at one time to look into making deb and rpm packages.  I'm
going to start looking at that today.  "apt-get install koha" would sure
be nice, eh?



> FYI, I think it would serious enhance the use of the product to add in the
> ISBM -> full record (ie Z39.50 and MARC items) since that is the easiest
> way to input records I can think of.

I've been working on Z39.50 searches.  I've gotten it to work with the
National Library of Canada, but I need to register with them to get full
marc record results.  The system that Koha currently uses to store book
data is not very compatible with MARC, and MySQL itself is probably not
the easiest medium to store MARC records in.  My thought on this was to
have some kind of automatic converter from MARC records to Koha data. 
Then users can choose to edit the MARC records, and the Koha records will
be modified accordingly.  Modifying Koha records directly would not have
an easy way to translate back to MARC format, since, for example, subject
classifications are stored in a simpler way (ie no indication if a subject
division is geographic, personal, chronological, etc.).

I have written my own parser for MARC records that works okay for me, and
I've been using it to import individual MARC records into Koha.  There are
also perl modules for handling MARC records, which I haven't investigated.

Steve.