On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Robert Soulliere <[email protected]> wrote: > 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?
No, this is perfectly fine. In fact, when all attempts by the system fail to find a unique TCN value (aka bibkey, IIUC, in the staging example) that's exactly what Evergreen will do -- there's a function that pulls a value from a sequence, and then adds a prefix so that it's obvious that the TCN was autogenerated. > > 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? > Modern versions of yaz-marcdump from the yaz toolkit from IndexData work very well. > By the way. I love Evergreen 1.4.0.2. Thanks to everyone working on this > project. > Thanks! -- Mike Rylander | VP, Research and Design | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: [email protected] | web: http://www.esilibrary.com
