Thanks everyone for your help! It's true, we really do need some funding. Ideally, a LOT of funding. I'm not a professional cataloguer (lots of paraprofessional experience, but in school libraries) and my aim is basically to get something up and running which we can use in the short-term and which won't create too many hideous problems for the future. The nature of our collection means that it will eventually all need to be catalogued by hand, so I can live with bad MARC records for now - I hope that it will all be correctly catalogued by a professional one day *misty eyed* Anyway, in the meantime it does seem as if MarcEdit is the way forward for letting me get my records into Koha. I have experimented with importing my records into the Liblime hosted demo version and they seem to be coming across well. However, is there a way to mass import bibliographic records with attached copy records? I'm finding the documentation a bit difficult to follow (it seems as if most of it is 2.x based, whereas the demo is 3.x - am I looking in the wrong place?) I imported my MARC records through Tools > Stage MARC records for import. Thanks very much for all your help (and sorry for my delayed reply - work overtook me). Best, Lucy On 6/5/08, Joe Tho <koha@joetho.com> wrote:

Hello Lucy,

Your problem is fairly typical.

If you import data in some non-marc format, and map the pertinent fields to their matching tags in the resulting marc records, you still wind up with bad marc records. "Bad" meaning there is a complete marc record for that material somewhere in the world and yours looks bad compared to it.

However, it would get you up and running. With bad records.

The value of a full complete marc record (in my opinion) is all the additional data in it. Subject headings, etc. Also, since it is an international standard, full marc records will allow you to make your catalog searchable by other libraries using the marc standard (through z39 communication between servers). Non-marc or incomplete marc records don't allow that. For example, if your incomplete marc records don'[t have any subject heading tags, you can't search by that.

Alternatively, you can do a "full retro" where you find the correct marc record for the material, download it into your system, add any local information (torn pages, shelf location, call #, etc), slap on a barcode and go on to the next one. Hiring a company to do a retro for you might be fifty cents a record or so (at least), and they will need a shelf list with whatever additional local info you can provide.

Perhaps a better solution would be to import your csv and turn it into marc records, albeit incomplete marc records, and then fix those records as time allows. As long as you don't share out your catalog (as a z39 server) with other libraries, who's to know? Your patrons would only be able to search via the information in those csv/incomplete records, which would improve as you improve those records.

You need some more funding, girl. And automating your catalog is an easy one to sell, in terms of grant proposals (are you in the US?). Aim high, include $ for additional equipment (a lot), and include fat money for additional staff salaries. You could hire a part-timer for like a year or two, and teach them to do what needs to be done.

Good luck! -Joe

-----Original Message----- From: koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Lucy Pearson Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 5:02 AM To: Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] Investigating Koha: import formats

Hi all,

I'm new to the list, and have only just begun investigating Koha, so apologies if I ask any silly questions! I'm at the stage of investigating Koha to see if it is suitable for my needs, and I'd really appreciate it if I could draw on your collective expertise. I have a specific question about Koha, but I'll also give a bit of detail on my circumstances, in case anyone has any more general ideas which can help me.

A bit of background: I work for a new archive which has a relatively substantial book collection (c. 20,000 items). Up until last year, these were completely uncatalogued and unlisted, so we've been working on a project to list our holdings. The plan is that once we have a handlist we can assess the collection, weed substantially and then put in place a formal cataloguing strategy. This last will include identifying a suitable LMS - we use DServe's CALM for the archive material, and may also put the books on there, but as it's primarily a museums / archive platform we have some reservations about that. To get a handlist quickly, we've catalogued using Readerware <http://www.readerware.com/> , which lets you scan barcodes and searches the web for the data associated with those ISBNs. Now we're at a point where we would really like to make it easy for people outside our library site to access this list, even though it's not a proper catalogue. So, we basically need a web OPAC - Readerware is not at all equipped to supply this. In the long term it would be really good to be using a standards-compliant library catalogue. so if I can migrate my data over to Koha that would be great for forward-planning.

My Koha question: Is it possible to import data to Koha in CSV or tab-delimited format? Unfortunately, none of my existing data has MARC records - I can export into those tewo formats, so I need a database which can accept those.

I strongly suspect the answer is no, but I wanted to be absolutely sure before I abandoned Koha completely. In addition, I'm hoping that if this isn't possible, this list of tech-savvy librarians might have good advice on alternatives. At this stage, I don't actually need a full-scale LMS - I just want a web app I can import my data to and which will allow users to seacrch by title, author, etc. (I've already explored LibraryThing, but for various reasons it's not really suitable.) It needs to be free software or very cheap, because we're so low on funds and this is an interim project.If I could get my data into Koha,a it would be perfect, because the full-scale LMS features are there if we need them, and the organisation would be able to buy in support if they found themseves without enough tech-savvy in house.

Any advice? I'll be most appreciative of any and all help!

Thanks!

Lucy