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 This E-mail contains privileged and confidential information intended only for the individual or entity named in the message. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is prohibited. If this communication was received in error, please notify the sender by reply E-mail immediately, and delete and destroy the original message.
