ByWater Question of the Week: How Do I Get an Export of our Koha Holdings for a Third-Party Service?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Feb 21, 2025

Each Friday, we will bring you a new ByWater Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How Do I Get an Export of our Koha Holdings for a Third-Party Service?

Answer: Libraries using Koha in conjunction with third-party services for discovery services, enrichment like cover images, or inerlibrary loan platforms sometimes need to provide an export of their catalog holdings to update information about their materials.

While this is something we can assist with for a large library, smaller libraries can also do this for themselves, especially if they have under 100k records. The Export data tool in the Cataloging Module can create a file of some or all MARC records. (The job may certainly take a while to complete, but unless it times out altogether, the job should succeed.)

The tool includes a number of parameters - owning branches, item call number ranges, bibliographic records only or records with item data included, and even accessioned date range. If a library needs a more targeted list of records based on more specific parameters, the tool will also accept a csv list of biblionumbers, which can be generated from a report.

The file output will typically be MARC, unless specified otherwise. Beneath that option is the ability to set a custom file name, if a specific convention is required by the third-party service.

This tool can also be used to export authority files.

Additional Resources

Koha Manual: Exporting bibliographic records