KohaCon13: Koha as a Citation Manager

by Joy Nelson on Oct 19, 2013

Fred King from Medstar Washington Hospital discussed how he uses Koha for journal citations at KohaCon13. When his old system was teetering on the brink, he installed Koha and migrated his data. The idea to use Koha as a citation database came about when the library sponsored an Author’s Day, which highlights local author’s works.

Fred pulls his citations from Medline – a database of medical journals run by National Library of Medicine started in 1966. Each entry in Medline has it’s own unique identifier along with Authors (AU), Fullname, Journal Details, Topics, Publication Type, etc. He edits the citations to remove the authors that are not related to his hospital – since this was related to his Author Day activities. He ‘maps’ those Medline tags to marc tags in order to create marc records. And he created Koha item types to match the types in the Medline citations. He then also modified the .xsl files to show the desired fields that he needed.

In order to maintain his citation database he set up an alert that will notify him if it finds a name that is on a list of potential authors he sets up. The lack of authority control in Medline complicates this process slightly. The list of matches needs to be culled to remove the non-resident authors and identify the local authors. The local authors are exported from Ovid with RIS field tags. He adds full-text links and adds department affiliation with “Replace Text” program. The list is imported in Reference Manager and available articles are printed. The RIS is converted to MARC and duplicate department tags are removed. The citations are compiled into an upload file and import the file into Koha. He now has his citations into Koha with links to the article.

If you are interested in more detail you can see his notes here: http://www.philobiblios.net/koha