DIBYENDRA HYOJU MADAN PURASKAR PUSTAKALAYA JUNE 14, 2011 Virtual Union Catalogue Using Koha ILS 1

Current scenario Most of the Nepali libraries are using WINISIS or CDS/ISIS library application Inconsistency in cataloging standards Electronic records found in most of the OPACs of Nepali libraries are inconsistent in record format In 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. 2

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 ( 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 3

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 termbiblioserver with publicserver in koha-conf.xml … … username password … … username password … … username password 4

Adding database in MarcEdit Z39.50 client 5

Adding New Z39.50 Server in Koha 6

Virtual Union Catalogue 7

Searching in MarcEdit 8

Searching Z39.50 targets in Koha 9

Search result in Koha Z39.50 client 10

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 11

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 12

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 attributes We are looking for alternate approaches To 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. 13

Thank you! Questions and answers 14