Koha 3.0--answer to the problems?

I was just looking back at old posts and seeing the hopes that the new version would address some of the search problems--new version, new problems! I think some of the problems may come from the administrative/global preferences set up.

I didn't look too closely at biblio record linking or item linking because it seems there are some other issues that maybe should be addressed first. One thing of interest in regard to the problem of where the item type information came from (bib record or item record) that we had in the previous version: in the "Global Systems Preferences: Cataloging" it shows a line item "item-level_itypes" which controls whether "the item type stored at the bib or item level is used for circulation policies."(Koha manual page) This line item doesn't exist in our version of Koha in "Global Systems Preferences: Cataloging."

Onto the present problems...in the same screen there is a somewhat confusing line: "NoZebra." We have this set to "ON" which means Zebra indexing is off, and on the line below, in "NoZebraIndexes" the value is "0" instead of a string of index definitions for the internal search engine to use when "NoZebra" is set to on. The above mentioned manual page has the string if we're not going to be using zebra. The page also offers these warnings for using "NoZebra:"

• If your library's collection is over 25,000 you must have this preference to OFF to get fast searching.
• Using this feature on a busy Koha installation has proven to be rather resource intensive.
• It is recommended that this setting NOT be changed after initial installation of Koha.

(oops, I initially changed the "NoZebra" setting before I had read that warning. I did set it back to the original setting.)

In looking at some of the Koha mail-list archives I found some messages that may help, but I'm afraid a lot of it is over my head, so I'm not sure if they will be helpful...It seems that even if the searching gets to working in the librarian interface, there may be other issues to address in order to get the searching to work in the public interface. A December 16 post talks about "rebuild_zebra" and it sounds like groups are running this at least once a day. Here is a Feb. 15 response to the same message, too. A Nov. 15 thread also offers some suggestions that I'm not sure if they are helpful or not--user and file owner are not the same-?

If we later encounter problems in the OPAC interface maybe the "hide lost items" needs to be disabled. If we run into problems with branch search later, check out the Jan. 28 thread.

I also ran the "MARC bibliographic framework test" and found that it returned some errors. In order to make it happy with the MARC to Koha field mapping I needed to put all of the subfields of a tag within the same folder (default and Basic Book frameworks):

049 a changed to tab 0
246 d and e changed to tab 1 and set to ignore (the field title says "obsolete")
696 a to tab 6
945 a to tab 9

Also, biblio.biblionumber Koha field needed to be linked to MARC 090c and biblioitem.biblioitemnumber needed to be linked to MARC 090d.