Every once in a while I help out with a Koha installation.
At the moment, they have asked me to fix a bunch of duplicate biblio
records. I have found two main ways to do this.
A manual way where you are in control every step of the way:
http://manual.koha-community.org/3.2/en/stafflists.html#mergebibrecs
And a potentially destructive way where you just guess and see what
happens:
https://saturn.ffzg.hr/koha/index.cgi?action=revision_view;page_name=removing_duplicate_records;revision_id=20091114221320
As I understand it, the latter basically has you choose one of the
biblio records, point all your identical items to the one biblio record,
and delete the other biblio records. Then, one runs a script
(sync_items_in_marc_bib.pl) to add any missing data to the biblio record
by pulling the data from the items.
Being a mysql guy and scripting guy, this latter approach seems to be
the "easy" way to do it. If I were a librarian and understood the
biblio data, I might be howling in anguish at the thought of randomly
selecting the biblio record. But I have no idea what the information
means. I am a sysadmin and have no real understanding nor ownership of
the data. And, I am not sure the people asking me to do this job
completely understand the nuances of this either.
So, I ask the Koha community for advice. Should I make a little script
that runs the duplicate biblio sql script, selects one of the biblio
records to point all the items to, and delete all the other biblio
records? One would need to sync the marc items and reindex when done.
Or is that basically a terrible thing to do?
And, if I make such a script, is there a place where I should put the
script so others do not need to make the same thing?
- Tim Young
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