[D and [A- these lovely little items that were probably introduced to the catalog way back in the Dynix Classic days when someone would press ctrl or backspace or something that the terminal emulator didn’t recognize and put into the record!! They are showing up now and the newer systems kick them out… not sure how you can find them, but if you can look for them! I’ve found most of these in the item records…
Koha has the ability currently to use Amazon, google book covers – our district decided we really needed to pay so it didn’t look like a comercial in the library catalog.
So I got quotes from Syndetics and Baker and Taylor Content Cafe’ I was soooo surprised when I got my quote from B&T that I called them 3 times to make sure it was right.
I then called a couple of people I knew that were using Content Cafe’ and they raved about it… So we are switching and going to have a couple of thousand on that front.
Also don’t forget that if you don’t track your own barcodes – to contract directly with the company that is for you when you switch! We have always used Computype and for the $2000 or so it is worth every penny for us not to track it right now. The vendors know how so we are going to give our vendors enough grief in December changing holdings tags that I don’t want to make them do anything more strange…
So I’m in today and running a mile a minute – feeling like we’re going to accomplish a TON today! We’ll see. We have both servers up and running!! Data is almost all migrated. We never were able to completely able to export all our data using the MARC export utility. Kept running into magazines with too many items! Hmm have another thought I will have to try… Export everything with one target, export magazines with another… Problem is the more data you want out the larger the MARC record gets, the fewer items you can have attached. I had one bib record with only 300 items, but we had so much information in notes etc… That we could only have 150 items per record!
Note for Biblio’s the full marc editor… If you have a firewall – we are not able to download the gears – so we had to have our networking group grab it and create an MSI or Snapshot so that only specific people will have the full screen/full MARC editor(basically the processing center).
We are hosting the servers locally and starting the actual setup of Koha this week. Lots of options to discuss! There is a really good manual for 3.0 at http://sites.google.com/a/liblime.com/koha-manual/Home/Table-of-Contents
It will walk you through and give good information on setup options.
More to come!
Well they are coming today to install the OS on the servers!! I also hope to install our instance of KOHA and the Biblios.
I had to have the google gears applet approved as we do not allow downloads to the workstation so it was blocked. So far that has worked with the approved software install. I’m still a little foggy on how Biblio’s works – dealing with say authority records. Once I have the workflow figured out I will let you know!
I do know that the Z3950 targets will continue to be an issue. Our proxy only allows 80 or 8080 traffic so Z servers run on various ports and we can’t get them running as it requires a 2 way communication usually. Now the Biblios.org – project sponsored by LibLime – is trying to create a creative commons database of MARC records! Kind of a open source marc record depository. So far though clients of Liblime will have access using Biblios, and then at some point they have talked about making it a subscription access tool.
Running the Z servers through that tool WOULD allow us to setup multiple Z server points to hit running off of their server and then the results would come back to me. WAITING WAITING… So many things in the fire…
Well off to email my project coordinator about a couple of items!
I spent most of last week with the Dataloaders getting the data out. Just when I thought I could get all of my Marc info out, we added a few more fields and it wouldn’t export the entire batch!
Then because I have over 1.2 million items the item file for circ was quite large so we decided I needed to ZIP all of my files before attempting to FTP them… Makes a world of difference.
Can I say that the two individuals I am working with are wonderful!! They are making this very easy for me to migrate EVERYTHING circ and item over to Koha in mid year.
Hopefully by the end of the week we will have a test instance to really pound on! Servers are all installed so next week they will come to install Koha on our local servers!! Then the data will all be transfered over and training will happen the week of Oct 27-29!! Very exciting times…
