Hi, in helping a group to migrate from Alice/Oasis to Koha, I've been asked to automatically import the current loans into Koha. I haven't noticed any scripts to achieve this so I'm having a bash at it here in perl. I'm currently figuring out how exactly the data maps between the two systems. I wonder if I could ask one or two questions about the Koha database. I gather the data I need to create is in the "issues" table which looks like this: +-----------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +-----------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | borrowernumber | int(11) | | MUL | 0 | | | itemnumber | int(11) | | MUL | 0 | | | date_due | date | YES | | NULL | | | branchcode | char(4) | YES | | NULL | | | issuingbranch | char(18) | YES | | NULL | | | returndate | date | YES | | NULL | | | lastreneweddate | date | YES | | NULL | | | return | char(4) | YES | | NULL | | | renewals | tinyint(4) | YES | | NULL | | | timestamp | timestamp(14) | YES | | NULL | | +-----------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ - The borrowernumber and itemnumber obviously relate to the primary keys in items and borrowers. - Do all loans stay in this table indefinitely even after they are returned? ie is this where the loan history is kept? - In terms of the dates, it looks like "date_due" is the current due date (duh!), "returndate" must then be the date the book is returned -- NULL initially, lastreneweddate is the date of last renewal. If this is so, do you store the date the book was first lent or not? Also, do you store the "renew history" of a given loan and where? - Do I guess correctly that there a single entry in this table per loan, not one for the initial loan and one for every renewal? - What exactly goes in the "return" field? - Is "renewals" an integer count of the number of times this particular loan has been renewed? - Should the timestamp be updated every time any record is changed or at record creation? - If I wanted statistics of how many loans/renewals were given out on a given day some time ago, could I do this? It appears not. I've looked over the wiki but i can't find this stuff directly. I'm happy wo wikifi an "issues table" page based on answers so that this info will be more easily available. Same for borrowers which I've already been over. Only if people thing this is a good idea of course. I guess it might complement: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:dbschema Many thanks, Gavin