Hi Barbara, Our library system of 9 libraries migrated to Koha from Winnebago Circ/Cat over the course of a year or two. Depending on the size of your collection, you probably don't have to close during a conversion. When I migrated each of our libraries, I generally gave myself a week or two to tweak the MARC records, importing those ahead of time (in which I put a freeze on adding or deleting new items to the old circ system) and then after the library would close on a Saturday afternoon I would import the rest of their data over the course of the weekend. Generally it would take a few hours. Of course, before I did all this I did numerous practice runs to make sure all would go smoothly. If you're doing the migration & support of Koha yourself, you should definitely set up one or more test systems to thoroughly familiarize yourselves with the migration process as well as Koha itself. Also, Kyle Hall, on our IT staff, wrote a collection of scripts for our conversion that you might find useful, although they were written for the dev_week version of Koha, not 3.0. You can find them here: http://kylehall.info/index.php/projects/koha-tools/ As for problems & MARC tweaking, you'll definitely want to make sure your records are properly encoded in UTF-8. I've found yaz-marcdump useful for that. You'll also need to set up your MARC frameworks in Koha to match your records, and/or tweak your records with MarcEdit before importing them. Cheers, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cindy Murdock IT Services Director Meadville Public Library | CCFLS http://meadvillelibrary.org | http://ccfls.org Barbara Keef wrote:
Hi,
Our public library is in the early planning stages of migration to KOHA from Winnebago/SPECTRUM.
Can any of the public libraries on this list-serv offer "advice" as far as preparation for this migration?
Q: Do we need to close during a conversion? Q: What is the average time for conversion as experienced by other libraries? Q: Are there any common problems we should look out for that other libraries may have gone through during the conversion process? Q. Is there any tweaking of our MARC records that would make the process smoother?
Thanks for any help. Barbara Keef
Barbara L. Keef Reference/Technology Librarian Windham Public Library 217 Windham Center Road Windham, Maine 04062 207-892-1908
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