Koha Tutorial Videos

Monday Minutes: Record Matching Rules

by Kelly McElligott on Feb 13, 2023

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie break down how to add new record-matching rules, what are match points, and how to apply these new rules to your MARC imports.

Record Matching Rules

Record matching rules are used when importing MARC records into Koha.

Koha is built in with default Record Matching Rules, such as ISBN, ISSN, 999$c (Koha's Unique Identifier), and an OCLC number: 035.

During an import, a staff member can pick which matching rule should be applied for this particular import.

Match Points

Setting up the match points is the first step (and potentially the only step) in creating a matching rule. These are criteria that you enter that must be met in order for an incoming record to match an existing MARC record in your catalog. You can have multiple match points on an import rule each with its own score. An incoming record will be compared against your existing records (‘one record at a time’) and given a score for each match point. When the total score of the match points matches or exceeds the threshold given for the matching rule, Koha assumes a good match and imports/overlays according your specifications in the import process.

Match Points can be used for both Bibliographic and Authority Imports.

Match Check

While match points work on the search index, match checks work directly on the data and can be used as the matching criteria instead of the match points or in addition to them to confirm true matches.

With Match Checks, a library can use one MARC field in the incoming record and match it on another MARC record in the current database.

Here is the Match Check we used in the example, first the match point was set to ISBN, and then we want Koha to then look at the Title for a fuller match: