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

[Robert Soulliere]

After further investigation Jason was right about my holdings import
effort. They are indeed not linked properly to the bib records. 

Back to the drawing board. 

I'll try the custom tag method using Perl and Marc::Record.

Also, for newbies like me. A great tutorial (written by Mike Rylander)
to understand what is going on in the parse_holdings.pl file is found at:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/MARC-Record/lib/MARC/Doc/Tutorial.pod

I downloaded yaz for converting marc to marcxml format. It works great
and is available from the site: http://www.indexdata.dk/yaz/. 

Thanks Jason and Mike for all your help with this.

Robert
 
 

----- Original Message -----
From: Jason Etheridge <jason at esilibrary.com>
Date: Friday, February 13, 2009 9:46 am
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] bibkey field issues when importing
holdings into staging_items table
To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
Cc: open-ils-dev at list.georgialibraries.org

> > 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.
> 
> I'd be tempted to make one.  Use Perl and MARC::Record and run through
> each record and add a custom tag, say 901, and put an incrementing
> number in subfield a.  Make sure you start the sequence above the
> max(id) of the biblio.record_entry (BRE) table in your database.  When
> you load the bibs, modify the loading process to use that value as the
> BRE id.  After loading the bibs, reset the sequence in the database to
> make sure its "nextval" will start above the new max(id) of BRE.
> 
> Then when you parse out the holdings, you know the exact BRE id used
> and can link them up.
> 
> > 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".
> 
> If I'm understanding correctly (just looking at the holdings import
> demo bundle), the bibkey is supposed to point to the BRE id for the
> bib record.  If you're just using a sequence there, then you may not
> be linking them to bib records at all, much less the right ones.
> 
> Am I misunderstanding?
> 
> -- 
> Jason Etheridge
> | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
> | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
> | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
> | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
> | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
> 


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