Koha assignment

Well, I meant to post something about this earlier since I finished this assignment on Friday night, but a busy holiday weekend has prevented me from doing that until now. Like Karen, I really enjoyed doing this assignment because I essentially got to catalog some books on my favorite subject (music). When I created my folder, I didn't label it as such (calling it "Matt B"). However, I would hope that our teachers get the general idea and given that the name of the class blog is evocative of The Basement Tapes (a series of recordings by Bob Dylan and The Band done in the mid '60s), I have very little doubt that they would.

In any case, I did run into several snags with it. First off, it was a little annoying that like what Professor Schlak (Tim) said, I got about a 50/50 hit-to-miss ratio with the ISBN search. I was never sure whether to use the 10 or 13 number ISBN. Sometimes I tried both and got one (but not the other) and sometimes I got neither. Sometimes I typed in the title or the author and found the book I wanted to catalog that way. At other points, I was surprised when searches for famous authors like Nick Hornby (as well as searching by the titles of his books) turned up absolutely nothing, but yet books by far lesser known authors (Brendan Halpin, for example) came up (not that I'm complaining about that, mind you). At first, I didn't realize that all of the items have to be about a specific subject because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough. It's a good thing that I looked at the other folders to get a general idea! Thus, I had to delete about 4-5 books that weren't specifically music-related, so that was a bit annoying but not a huge deal.

What was a bigger deal was that sometimes (though on only a few occasions, thankfully), I got that nasty error right after the step where I put in the extra bit of information in the 3rd box about it automatically filled in the missing item fields after downloading much of the needed information when it was found in the internet search (sorry I don't have Koha open now so I forgot the specific step). This was usually after it had been hanging for 4-5 minutes, too! All that waiting and for nothing! I figured that it was just a problem with Koha, though, because usually I was able to get it to work after 2-3 tries. If it still didn't work, I would just move on to another book and usually, that would work. Still, the assignment took a bit longer than it should have for that reason. Perhaps internal improvements to this step and to Koha in general are in order?

At first, I also didn't realize that I had to make my folder public, but that was easy enough to change. Well, now I have to finish some reading for LIS 2000 and to start on a paper for that class. In the words of a Government Issue album title, the fun just never ends!

Oh and before I forget, I wanted to say that Dr. Tomer's instructional video was absolutely invaluable in terms of helping me to complete this assignment. Without it, I would've been totally lost. What helped me was pausing it as I was going along and cataloging my first item and after a few items, I didn't need to view it anymore.