Alaska Bush Library Service

I learned an important lesson yesterday. The definition of the terms biblioitems and items. biblioitems refers to the marc record for a book. Items refers to each individual book. Thanks to Josh at Liblime.

I took a chance to call Liblime yesterday. I am not one of their customers. I was hoping that they would help me with a couple of questions. They were. Now I am changing Marc records again to put all the individual information in 952 rather than 852. Itemtype is staying in 852.

I am using Marc Edit by Terry Reese which is another OS program to edit the Marc Records. Marc Edit is a nice program that allows me to do uniform changes throughout the records. Before you can do that, you break the marc records down so that they can be read by text editor. Then there are some find and change commands that you can use. In the end the program rebuilds the text file into MARC so that you can use it.

What this means for me, over the next few days I will be rebuilding the marc records for 17 different sites. In the end event, I will take the records to Dan at DanTech services and he will upload them to the computer. He will have dumped the current records that are in the system. We should have a great system at that point.

After that, patron records and beyond…..

We loaded MARC records into Koha last week.  I still have some revisions that I am working on, but it is so good to see things up and running.  The goal for December is to have all the bugs worked out and patrons loaded so that the library aides in our schools can begin to use the program.

I will introduce the program to the staff that are more computer literate first.  I travel to their schools for a week at a time.  While I am there, we will have some good one on one training for Koha.  This is one of the biggies on the list of things to do.  The best part of having Koha loaded with data is that there can be a list of things to do:

• Update the authorized values tables.
• Possibly reload MARC records.
• Decide what patron information we want to include.
• Input patron records. - We have looked at what transfers from our current program and are not happy with the information.
• Do something nice for Dan, who has been a great help with setting this up.
• Somehow, I know that this list will be growing.

Check out the OPAC, and please let me know if you have any comments.