Koha Question of the Week: How Can We Add and Troubleshoot Z39.50 targets?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Dec 29, 2023

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

Question: How Can We Add and Troubleshoot Z39.50 targets?

Answer: Libraries are empowered to add their own Z39.50 copy cataloging targets to Koha in Koha Administration -> Additional Parameters -> Z39.50/SRU servers.

Required fields are Server name (the name of the library that will display in the cataloging module when a Z39.50 search is performed), host name (typically a URL), port, and database. IRSpy maintains a public listing of library credentials, complete with reliability. But libraries may also find other Z39.50 targets through the Koha wiki, and of course, through leveraging the personal connections of Library Land.

For Syntax in setting up a connection, most of our U.S. and Canadian partners will want to select "MARC21/USMARC." The default selected syntax is UNIMARC, which will need to be changed. Bringing in MARC21/USMARC records in UNIMARC syntax can cause system errors, so that's one place to check if records are coming in from Z39.50 with bad data.

For encoding, the two common ones are utf8 or MARC-8. Utf8 is common enough that it's reasonable to leave as a default unless records come in with bad diacritics. If that happens, then switching the encoding to MARC-8 should resolve the issues. A good quick test is searching up a record that would have something with an accent mark in a title or author, like Pokémon or Gabriel García Márquez, since those special characters will quickly display encoding issues with a � in the symbol's place. (Specialized libraries will probably need a more discipline-specific test case, but the two suggestions will work for libraries with broad collections.)

If a target is consistently not returning results, it's worth checking IRSpy for reliability and to confirm the credentials or reaching out to the library directly to find out if anything has changed - they may have migrated library systems, for example, and the information initially provided is no longer correct. For libraries that connect to OCLC via Z39.50, it's worth checking whether the login credentials in the Userid/Password fields are correct and current. Another error that sometimes pops up is making sure the port information is not doubled up (added in both the end of the hostname URL and separately in the port field in Koha's Z39.50 connection information). And, of course, a once-over for typos or trailing spaces is always a good idea.

Additional Resources

Adding Z39.50 Targets (Monday Minutes)