Monday Minutes: Advanced Cataloging Editor

by Kelly McElligott on Mar 11, 2024

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie walk through the basics of the Advanced Cataloging Editor.

Advanced Cataloging Editor

There are two ways to catalog a record in Koha, the basic editor and the advanced editor.

To use the advanced editor, there is a system preference to enable this cataloging process.

Setting the system preference: EnableAdvancedCatalogingEditor to enable will allow libraries use the Advanced Editor. Great news, a library can have this enabled and also use the basic editor. So the flexibility is there for different staff to choose the way they catalog.

The Advanced Editor has some key benefits to using this:

• Usability- only fields that appear in the record will show up. There is less scrolling and more keyboard focused on this feature over the basic editor.
• Customizability- within the Advanced Editor users can create Macros to easily add marc fields while cataloging.
• Keyboard Shortcuts- A user can customize the keyboard shortcuts created in the advanced editor to fit their needs.

Permission

Staff will need to have the permission to use the Advanced Editor which can be found under the heading:

Edit catalog (Modify bibliographic/holdings data) (editcatalogue)

- Use the advanced cataloging editor (requires edit_catalogue) (advanced_editor)

Features

Import: Within the Advanced Editor, a user can import a marc file into this form and edit that record.

Settings: Users can change font size, font type, switch over to the basic editor.

Alerts: Any time a user saves a record and receives an error during a session, the error will save under Alerts.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Koha has created keyboard shortcuts for users to be able to insert delimiters, insert line breaks, delete lines and more! This allows this cataloging module to be used primarily with the keyboard. These shortcuts can be redefined, the option to redefine them can be accessed through the Admin module under Additional Parameters. If these shortcuts are altered in the Keyboard Shortcut option, this change will apply to the entire Koha system for each user.

Using the Z39.50 within the Advanced Editor is also available. The far-right search box will allow the user to add key fields, such as title, author, ISBN - and immediately search the targets set up in Koha. Clicking on the Advanced Search will open up a more comprehensive version of a z39.50 search for the user and also include searching the existing Koha records within this site- called "Local Catalog".

Once a record has been found, under the tools button, the user can import this record into the Advanced Editor to make further edits.

Macros

Macros can be extremely helpful if your library adds specific MARC fields into a record and would like to streamline this process, such as adding RDA fields. Another way macros can be used is when the library would like to delete fields that are normally imported into the record.

A "Public macro" box can be found in the Macros option. This allows users to share the macro to the users within the same system.

Jessie and Kelly in the tutorial video above showed adding the 942$c to a record

new 942=‡CBOOK

Note:

BOOK - this is the code for Book within the system. Each library may use a different code for item types. Go to the Administration Module > Item Types to find out the code of the item type.

And also adding a macro when needing to suppress a record from the catalog:

new 942=‡n1

More resources on Macros for the Advanced Editor.

Additional Resources

Did you know there were other Koha Shortcuts?

Jumping between tabs on the Search Box at the top of the screen:

Alt-q will jump to Catalog Search

Alt-u will jump to the checkout (sadly this doesn’t work for Mac Users)

Alt-w will jump to renewal

Alt-r will jump to check-in

For mac users, instead of the Alt key, you will use the Option Key.

These commands mean to do the two keys together, so pushing Alt AND the letter q for example.

What about a searching shortcut?

Typing sn: biblionumber in the search bar will bring you to that bib record.