[Koha-devel] Re: [Koha] Follett to Koha 2.2.9 migration help

[Mason James]

On 2008/03/8, at 5:24 AM, Darren De Zeeuw wrote:

> I am the volunteer IT guy for a small private school.  We have been  
> using
> Follett's Circ Plus/Cat Plus software for many years, but their  
> upgrade path
> is too expensive and our old Mac OS 9 machine running the software  
> in the
> library had a disk failure.  It's time to find another solution.   
> Koha seems
> to be the perfect fit for us, but I need to show that it's better  
> than what
> we have in order to get approval.


Hi Darren,

Recently at LIblime, we did some conversions from Follet systems to  
Koha.

>  I have a MICROLIF file with around 8000 records
> exported from our Follett catalog.  I ran the bulkmarcimport.pl  
> script and
> it brought most of the data over as far as I can see (I'm not a  
> librarian),
> but seems to be missing our bar-coding information at least.  I'm also
> unsure if I can migrate over our patron list as well.


The missing item info you are describing is because Follet's MICROLIF  
marc records store their item-info in the 852 fields ( from memory... )
(Every ILS vendor have their little quirks about where they stuff the  
item-level info, Follets looks to be in 852

What is needed is a small script to fetch those Follet 852 item- 
values and move them to their corresponding Koha 952 fields, then  
write those corrected records out to a new file.
Run Bulkmarcimport.pl on this new file, and you will successfully  
pick up those missing item-level values in your Koha marc import.

FYI: when i get some time, I plan to add to the koha-wiki some  
general code examples of this mapping process I described.

I hope that helps,

Cheers, Mason.