Monday Minutes: How to Attach a File to MARC Records

by Kelly McElligott on Feb 28, 2022

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie show how to enable the option in your frameworks to upload files to a MARC record.

MARC Bibliographic Framework

We will start in the Koha Administration - and go to MARC frameworks. Once you are in the Frameworks, you can set to enable this on a specific framework that you will most likely upload files to. This can be done for any or all of your frameworks.

Once you are in the desired Framework, find your 856 MARC tag, click Edit Subfields (under the Action button) and the U tab is where we will be editing. Once you have clicked the U tab, go to the bottom of the form, to other options.

choose the "Upload.pl" option from the Plugin dropdown list. Then hit SAVE.

Koha Cataloging - Adding or Editing an Existing MARC record

Once you are in the editor in the cataloging module, you will now see a new option on the far right of the 856$u subfield.
If you want to add a specific Text to the link, you can use the 856$y for text. This text will link to the PDF and include the text you include.

See screenshots below:

A bibliographic record can have multiple 856$u fields, so if a library needs to attach more than one item, they can!

From here, click that upload option. You will then upload the file that you would like to attach to this record. This will upload, and you will then +choose, to actually connect this file to your MARC record.

Once this has been attached, save your MARC record! This will now be accessible to the viewer to access this document you have attached.

If you are planning on uploading a lot of MARC records, please let ByWater Solutions or your Support Vendor, as it will increase your server size. It could also affect performance if extremely large files are attached.