One of the most important things a librarian does is manage the metadata describing the library's resources. Put more simply, it is essential that a library maintain good catalogue records describing the items held by the library, so they can be found and retreived as needed. This involves modifying records created by other librarians to match a specific library's needs, or sometimes creating new records.
This section assumes that the reader is familiar with cataloging theory and practice, and describes only the mechanics of adding, editing, and deleting bibliographic records in Koha. If you need help with the general cataloging concepts found in this section, many schools offer cataloging courses, and some "quick start" guides can be found on the Internet.
This section is divided into two subsections; the subsection that is relevant to your library depends upon whether or not you enabled MARC support in your Catalogue system preferences. It is a good, idea, however, to scan through both sections, to get a complete overview of cataloging in Koha.
Adding a new MARC record to the Koha database involves the "Add biblio" function. While there are several ways to access this function, the easiest is directly from the Koha home page, by highlighting "Catalogue" and "Add biblio":
The process of adding a biblio record starts with a search of the catalog, either by ISBN or by title, to verify that there is not already a catalog record for the item. If, however, you are certain that the item has never been cataloged before, you can bypass the search by clicking on the "Create empty biblio" button. (Be sure you choose the biblio framework within which you want to work before creating the empty biblio.)
If you do a search first, you may find records that match your search term. If so, you must decide if one of these records is one you want to use, or do you need to create a new record. Note that the search looks not only in your active catalogue, but also in the reservoir of any other catalogue records you may have accumulated, perhaps from Z39.50 searches.
If you decide to use an existing record, you can either edit the record to add new information, duplicate the record to create a new record based on the old record, or add an entirely new record to the catalogue. This decision will determine whether you click on "Edit," "Duplicate," or "Add New Biblio." (And again, be sure you choose a biblio framework from the pull-down menu next to the "Add New Biblio" button.)
Regardless of what you choose, you finally arrive at the screen for entering or editing bibliographic information.
If you are editing a record or working with a duplicate record, some of the fields on this page will already have data in them. If you are adding a new record, most fields will be blank, unless your Biblio Framework specifically has some controlled values built into it (as is the case with MARC tag 090 in the figure). The fields that you see, where you see them, and controlled values in fields are all determined entirely by the Biblio Framework(s) you set up in your Parameters. If you find this display to be inconvenient, go back to Parameters and either edit your existing Biblio Framework or create a new one.
There are some tag names that are followed by a plus sign ("+"); these tags may be repeated by clicking on the "+". (Currently, there is no mechanism for repeating subfields.) Other fields are followed by three dots ("..."); these fields can be filled in by referencing special scripts or authorities you may created. We will discuss the procedure for using these tools in the next section.
When you have entered the values you want in all the fields you want (on all the tabs), click on "Add biblio" to save the general bibliographic record and proceed to the screen for adding item information. Since adding items is the same no matter whether or not you are using MARC records, we will look at that process after the section about adding bibliographic records to a non-MARC catalogue.