Hi Elaine, You will need a field to match on. If ISBN does not work for you then some sort of control number should do. I often use a control number in the 001 and set up a matching rule on that field. If you have no match field it becomes a manual job and others might have a better idea how to merge two bib records while keeping items from both records along with any other associated loan data etc... Remember that the biblio matching uses the zebra search indexes so the first batch must be loaded and indexed before loading the second batch. Also (I recall someone had this issue) if you have a batch which itself has duplicates by (say) ISBN and you try to load it on an empty database, and you want it to de-duplicate the bibs and add the items, that won't work. This is because the matching looks in the zebra indexes which are not built at that point. There are ways to overcome this (extract a unique list of ISBNs from the data and make minimal bib records with just ISBN, build zebra indexes then load the real data matching on ISBN). Hope that makes sense... Ian On 28/09/2010 17:19, Elaine Bradtke wrote:
Has anyone done their bulk imports in batches? We've got different collections that are in separate databases. I was planning to import each collection separately, because there are slightly different things that have to be done to the data in each collection. But there's a catch (isn't there always). There are duplicate copies of some the same items across the collections. It seems logical that they should share the same biblio, and have the location, and collection information at the item level. How does this work if you are importing the different collections in sequence? A lot of our stuff pre-dates ISBN so even identifying them may be a trick. However, I was wondering how / if anyone has dealt with this problem.
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