[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] General Questions

[Mike Rylander]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Bill Ott <bott at grpl.org> wrote:
>
>  >>  1. We currently use Baker & Taylor for cataloging of new book purchases.
>  >>  We download records from their web site, and then upload them into
>  >>  Unicorn..I assume this would also be possible with Evergreen, but is the
>  >>  process simple?
>  >>
>  >
>  > I'm not familiar with Baker & Taylor, sorry.
>  >
>  > But I'm interested in some more detail- are you downloading just the
>  > bibliographic records via Z39.50? Evergreen supports this today; you
>  > would just have to set up Baker and Taylor as a Z39.50 source.
>  >
>  > Or are you downloading batches of MARC bibliographic records into a
>  > file, that you then load into Unicorn (either via a report or via some
>  > cataloging tool)? This is not quite as easy today; at the moment, to
>  > load batches of records into Evergreen you have to run some command
>  > line scripts.
>
>  We use Baker & Taylor's Title Source 3, and download MARC records based
>  on our orders, which I believe is what's being described.  What I've
>  done is create some slightly modified import scripts, run as CGI
>  scripts, which allows batch importing from these files to add bib
>  records.  It also works for OCLC's CatME files, and probably others.
>
>  It's a quick and dirty approach, and we're only using it on a test
>  basis, but it works well for dumping some data into the database
>  relatively quickly.  For production use it needs some TLC.
>
>  The beauty of the Evergreen staff client is that it's essentially a Web
>  browser.  So, you can run a CGI script right in the client, and with
>  some minor tweaks add it right in as a cataloging menu option.
>
>

Bill, would you be willing to share what you have right now, either
on-list, directly to me, or perhaps as a ILS-Contrib package?  There
are thorny problems with large batches (as I'm sure you know) but I'd
love to see what you've got right now.  Maybe it's a better or
alternate starting point for "simple batch ingest" than my current
Project Vandelay (import/exporter joke from Seinfeld, for those that
aren't big fans of the show).

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email: miker at esilibrary.com
 | web: http://www.esilibrary.com