[VuFind-General] Merging/appending records?

[Sandford, M. <SAN...@wp...>]

Hello VUFinders,

I'm stuck and hoping someone can help.  We're a Voyager library.  My
colleagues have asked that location information be included in VUFind in
order to limit queries by location.  Here are a few things I believe to
be true (and if they're not, this problem just got easier):

Voyager will only export holdings information in a Bib-MFHD interleaved
file
VUFind cannot handle the interleaved file
By default, the Solr indexer will completely replace old bib records
with new ones 

I can think of three ways to get the information I need into VUFind.
The first way is to generate separate MARC files, one for each location,
then adjust the import properties file to add location information into
a field I create.  The problem with these approaches is that, if my
assumptions about the solr indexing is correct, this doesn't work for
titles with multiple copies in different locations.  The location last
imported will "win" and overwrite location information previously
loaded. The second way is to index the full MARC load, then generate a
"fake" MARC file that only has 001s and 852s with locations.  But again,
this would require appending or merging the information in the index.  

The third way is to somehow insert all the location information I need
into a single bib record, then load the entire file at once.  The issue
here is that Voyager doesn't want to do that for me, and I can't see any
easy way to do that after I export from Voyager.  Gary Strawn's
vgerselect program actually will do this (it'll create multiple 852s,
one for each MFHD in Voyager, and insert them into the MARC file as it
extracts records) but that program is prohibitively slow.

Thoughts?

Mark Sandford
Special Formats Cataloger
David and Lorraine Cheng Library
William Paterson University
973-720-2437