Hello Suresh, I'm no koha expert, but I would solve your problem by writing a little perl script to convert your data into MARC format and then import it into your new Koha installation. I had to do something similar to import data for a library I'm migrating to koha, which currently uses a little custom script to parse its biblios which are held in a text file, each line something like this: munns donaldw|londonanidoj|p||MUNNS, Donald W|812 -311.2 MUN| Londonanidoj|Rickmansworth (GB)|Esperanto Publishing Company|1946| 98p. 18cm.||K19b Munns 424| The script I used is very quick and dirty, and looks like this (I can send the whole thing if you'd like...): ------ #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use MARC::Record; use Data::Dumper; open (KOHADATA, "ludkatalogo.txt"); open(OUTPUT, '> katalogo.mrc'); my $c = 0; my @marcfields; while ( <KOHADATA> ) { $c++; print "\n$c\n"; @marcfields = split(/\|/,$_); print $marcfields[5]; # Create a new record my $record = MARC::Record->new(); $record->encoding( 'UTF-8' ); # Cataloging Source my $catsource = MARC::Field->new( '040','','', a => 'Biblioteko Butler', b => 'epo', c => 'Martin Morris <martin@martinmorris.org>', d => 'Martin Morris <martin@martinmorris.org>' ); # UDC Classification my $udc = MARC::Field->new( '080','','', 2 => 'Biblioteko Butler', a => $marcfields[5] ); # Geoff King's Classification my $gkclass = MARC::Field->new( '084','','', a => $marcfields[12], 2 => 'Geoffrey King <ancientbriton@tiscali.co.uk>' ); # Author my $author = MARC::Field->new( '100',1,'', a => $marcfields[4] ); [.....various other fields imported appropriately] $record->append_fields($catsource, $udc, $gkclass, $author, $titleinfo, $publicationplace, $physicals, $bibliographic, $kohastuff, $koha952); print OUTPUT $record->as_usmarc(); } close(OUTPUT); close(KOHADATA); Yours would probably need to interrogate your simple table and create the array that way, before dumping as MARC records. Anyway, that may help. I imagine some of the gurus on here will come up with a better idea though! Martin On 29 Aug 2007, at 01:00, koha-request@lists.katipo.co.nz wrote:

Message: 1 Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:26:02 +0530 From: S P Suresh <spsuresh@cmi.ac.in> Subject: [Koha] Import query To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Message-ID: <709A1480-F1C5-46BD-BE47-00CD9FB33448@cmi.ac.in> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

Dear all,

Can some developers on the list please help me. We have an existing library system maintained currently as a rudimentary mysql table with a minimum of fields (barcode, authors, title, publisher, year). How best can we import this data into Koha? Does it suffice to write some Perl code to load these values into the biblio, items, biblioitems tables? Or will it break something? Another idea is to just load the relevant fields into the biblio table, without worrying about the items and biblioitems tables. (We are planning to manually look into each record (searching by author or title) and fill in the biblio details with a Z39.50 import, as well as other relevant fields like barcode.) Can some of the experts tell me whether this will work properly, without breaking the way Koha works? We want to have our old data up and running with Koha.

Thanks in advance for the help. We are experimenting with Koha in our library, and it is vital that we start on some rudimentary functionality at least. Later when some of us are more familiar with its workings, we can realise its full benefits. But it is taking time, and we need this help urgently.

If the above approaches are wrong, can someone please tell me what is the best approach?

Thanks in advance, Suresh