{"id":1727,"date":"2014-01-06T14:52:24","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T14:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/copyright.lboro.ac.uk\/lorls\/?p=1727"},"modified":"2014-01-06T14:52:24","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T14:52:24","slug":"integrating-lorls-with-koha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/lorls\/koha\/integrating-lorls-with-koha","title":{"rendered":"Integrating LORLS with Koha"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Loughborough we use Ex Libris’s Aleph<\/a> as our Library Management System (LMS). Our LORLS reading list system also makes use of Aleph in a number of ways:<\/p>\n

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  1. To provide bibliographic information via Z39.50, allowing people to quickly add works to reading lists by simply entering the ISBN,<\/li>\n
  2. In batch jobs to check which works the library holds, again using Z39.50,<\/li>\n
  3. To find how many items for a work are held and how many are available for loan which is displayed on a work’s detail pop up in CLUMP. \u00a0This has been done using the Ex Libris X Server product (not to be confused with X11 servers!),<\/li>\n
  4. To build up lists of current and past loans, used for purchase prediction, high demand reporting and usage tracking. \u00a0This is mostly done using custom local Perl scripts that interrogate Aleph’s Oracle database directly and then provide an XML API that LORLS code calls.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We’ve recently had another site say they are interested in using LORLS, but they use the Koha LMS<\/a>. \u00a0They asked us what would be needed to allow LORLS to integrate with Koha? \u00a0Luckily Koha is open source, so we could just download a copy and install it on a new virtual machine to have a play with and see what was needed.<\/p>\n

    Looking up bibliographic information was pretty simple to support. \u00a0Koha has a built in Z39.50 server, so all we needed to do was to tweak the LUMP.pm file on our dev server to point the\u00a0Z3950Hostname(),\u00a0Z3950Port() and\u00a0Z3950DBName() to point to our new VM, the port that Koha’s Z39.50 server is running on and the new Z39.50 database name (which appears to default to\u00a0“biblios”). \u00a0That seemed to work a treat.<\/p>\n

    Get item holdings for works was a bit more involved. \u00a0Koha obviously doesn’t have Ex Libris’s X server, so we needed another way to get similar data. \u00a0Luckily Koha does implement some of the Digital Library Federation<\/a> Integrated Library System – Discovery Interface<\/a>\u00a0recommendations. \u00a0One of these Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is called GetRecords() and, given a set of system record identifiers, will return an XML document with just the sort of information we need (eg for each item linked to a work we get things like item type, whether it can be loaned, what its due date is if it is on loan, if it is damaged, lost, etc).<\/p>\n

    Unfortunately LORLS doesn’t know anything about Koha’s system record identifiers, and the GetRecords() ILS-DI API doesn’t appear to allow searches based on control numbers such as ISBNs. \u00a0To get the system record numbers we can however fall back on Z39.50 again, which Koha uses to implement the ILS-DI SRU type interfaces. \u00a0Searching for a Bib-1 attribute of type 1007 with the value set to be the ISBN gets us some nice USMARC records to parse. \u00a0We need to look at the 999 $c<\/em> field in the MARC record as this appears to be the Koha system record identifier.<\/p>\n

    Just to make things interesting we discovered accidentally that in Koha you can end up with more than one work for the same ISBN (and each work can then have multiple physical items). \u00a0I guess this is a flexibility feature in some way, but it means that we need to make sure that we get all the system record identifiers that match our ISBN from LORLS and then pass all of these to the Koha GetRecords() API. \u00a0Luckily the API call can take a whole set of system record identifiers in one go, so this isn’t too much of a problem.<\/p>\n

    One thing we do have to have in the code though is some way of distinguishing between loan categories (long loan, short loan, week loan, reference, etc). \u00a0In Koha you can create an arbitrary number of item types which can correspond to loan categories, to which you can then assign things like differing loan rules. We slipped in:<\/p>\n