Guide to searching.
October 2008
This brief guide will explain a chart that shows a sample of how a MARC21 database can be configured, as well as a brief introductory searching guide. The indexing fields described in this document relate to the bibliographic data and does not address authority database indexing.
Koha's databases are indexed by the Zebra open-source software. The overview to the documentation describes Zebra as:
"...Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and provides access to them through a powerful combination of Boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.
Zebra supports large databases (tens of millions of records, tens of gigabytes of data). It allows safe, incremental database updates on live systems. Because Zebra supports the industry-standard information retrieval protocol, Z39.50, you can search Zebra databases using an enormous variety of programs and toolkits, both commercial and free, which understands this protocol..." Zebra - User's Guide and Reference, p. 1, http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/doc/zebra.pdf
This brief guide will explain a chart that shows a sample of how a MARC21 database can be configured, as well as a brief introductory searching guide. The indexing fields described in this document relate to the bibliographic data and does not address authority database indexing.
The indexing described in this document is the set used by SouthEastern University. Your local indexing may vary.