DIBYENDRA HYOJUMADAN PURASKAR PUSTAKALAYA

JUNE 14, 2011

Virtual Union CatalogueUsing Koha ILS

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Current scenario

Most of the Nepali libraries are using WINISIS or CDS/ISIS library application

Inconsistency in cataloging standardsElectronic records found in most of the OPACs of

Nepali libraries are inconsistent in record formatIn the recent years, few of the Nepali libraries

have migrated to Koha ILS and started to migrate their records into MARC standard

Currently, there is no electronic union catalog in Nepal

Nepal National Library (NNL) has published a printed version of union catalogue containing catalogs of 15 different Nepali libraries.

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Virtual Union Catalogue

The idea of developing virtual union catalogue is to help end-users to find out holdings information about a particular library material in the target libraries

It is being developed using PHP with PHP-YAZ library (http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/phpyaz/)

End-users can query in a single interface the different collections of the Nepali libraries

Libraries can reuse the MARC records instead of recreating the records again

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Configuring Koha to expose Z39.50/SRU services

Remove the commenting characters from the line in the /usr/share/koha/koha-conf.xml file so as to make the line look like following:

Copy the “server” and “serverinfo” elements and replace the term “biblioserver” with “publicserver” in koha-conf.xml

<listen id="publicserver" >tcp:@:9999</listen> 

<server id="biblioserver" listenref=" biblioserver ">

……

</server>

<serverinfo id=" biblioserver ">…<user>username</user> <password>password</password>

</serverinfo>

<server id="biblioserver" listenref=" biblioserver ">

……

</server>

<serverinfo id=" biblioserver ">…<user>username</user> <password>password</password>

</serverinfo>

<server id=“publicserver" listenref=" publicserver ">

……

</server>

<serverinfo id=" publicserver ">…<user>username</user> <password>password</

password></serverinfo>

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Adding database in MarcEdit Z39.50 client

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Adding New Z39.50 Server in Koha6

Virtual Union Catalogue7

Searching in MarcEdit8

Searching Z39.50 targets in Koha9

Search result in Koha Z39.50 client10

Searching algorithm of VUC

Search and retrieve bibliographic information from the different Koha systems;

Extract holdings data from the retrieved MARC records;

Merge the records according to the titles or other appropriate fields;

Create a unique list of titles containing bibliographic information and holdings data of the specific titles;

Display the unique list of records in a sorted order

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Problems with our current approach

Depends on bandwidth and sometimes it returns no result

Dumping all the search results from the Z39.50 servers in the MySQL database and displaying the database results uniquely with holdings information of the libraries was successful, but it gets unreliable when the search returns a large set of records

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Challenges

Merging the search results from the different Koha ILSs and displaying unique records with their holdings information without using database has not yet been possible

Searching multiple attributesWe are looking for alternate approachesTo process the MARC records of the partner

libraries properly and to identify the records uniquely, MARC records need to be complete and correct, in compliance with the MARC 21 standard.

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Thank you!

Questions and answers

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