[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] bibkey field issues when importing holdings into staging_items table

[Robert Soulliere]

I ran into some snags when importing holdings into the staging_items
table in regards to the "bibkey" field. I sort of devised a work around
but am unsure if this is workable in the long run.  

Here was the snag: I could not find a viable option for our biibkey
field in staging_items. I tried using marc fields 035, 001, 010 among
others but none of these seemed to work. Either some records did not
include some of these or the data was left non-unique after stripping
out the non-numeric characters. The "Bibkey" field requires an integer
data type.

Here was my possibly not-so-great workaround: I changed the "bibkey"
data type in the staging_items table to serial (auto-increment) and
edited parse_holdings.pl so that it did not place data in "bibkey".
Using this method, I was able to import the holdings and everything
seems to work (at this time). I was just wondering if this method would
cause disastrous results down the road when we add more records? If this
was a bad move, what would be some good alternatives? Should I combine
marc fields for the bibkey field or is there another option out there?    

Also, I used records in the USMARC format. Is it strongly recommended to
convert files to MARCXML for this process or are both formats reasonably
good. Could someone recommend a good MARCXML converter or is there a
script in Evergreen I could use for this?

By the way. I love Evergreen 1.4.0.2. Thanks to everyone working on this
project.
   
Thanks,
Robert 
  


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