[Koha] Re: Follett to Koha migration

[KL Nasveschuk]

This is not in production use yet. It is not even on a production
server. I believe Koha supports all tags however if you use tags in MARC
records in the 9xx range that are not listed in the default setup you
would have to create the tags first then upload your data using
bulkmarcimport.

Clean data. In Koha my itemtype is mapped to 300f tag. Later I found out
that some of the schools never used the 300 tag at all. As a result
itemtype for some records shows no icon, and if I searched by itemtype
those would be excluded also. I would say that clean data is important.

The process of going from Follett to Koha is difficult. I started from
what Mike Reavey's wiki and added to that. For example, all the records
that come out of Follett need to be funneled into a specific itemtype.
For Koha, I used the 300f tag mapped to Koha biblioitems.itemtype. The
itemtype information I got from the leader in the record (characters 06
and 07), then made a decision what itemtype they would fall under. I
believe that you could map other fields to itemtypes as NPL has but, the
data that I got out of Follett between schools was not the same from
school to school. I had to pick something that I could rely on from
school to school that said, for example, the record is a book or a sound
recording, blah, blah..

How involved was everyone. The 5 schools are faced with the cost of
upgrading to a web version of Follett (expensive), moving to a Windows
server and ongoing support contracts. At this point I don't see any
money now for any of that. That means they stay with what they have,
which is 5 independent library systems running on 5 different servers.
The librarians are are not particularly pleased to stay where they are
and not upgrade. I offered to get this working as a prototype to
demonstrate with their records, that there is an alternative. Some are
more receptive to the idea than others. The bottom line is that there is
no money for the upgrades.

Another benefit of Koha is that OpenLDAP is used for authentication.
Right now all students in Middle School and High School and all staff
district wide have LDAP accounts that could also be used to access Koha.
That in itself makes Koha perfect for this environment. There are
roughly 2500 user accounts in LDAP already.

We live in a "push button get banana world". If the icon a user clicks
doesn't do exactly what it did last time, is the wrong color, or is on
the right side of the screen instead of the left, there will be
complaints. There will be objections because it isn't Follett. There
will be objections no matter what happens. Nothing is written in stone,
all I can do is demonstrate that it works, the accessibility is much
better than the current Follett solution, the cost benefits across the
board and the future savings.

Hopefully, I can post my notes on installation and migration soon. I've
done it enough times and am feeling more comfortable with migrating MARC
records and what Koha requires. There are still some problems, but at
this point nothing I can't resolve. In the mean time here's the URL to
look at my demo site. It's been loaded with biblios and copies from 5
schools:

http://www.wareham.mec.edu:8000

Kent N

 
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 10:37 -0600, Cory Jaeger wrote:
> At this point I don't actually have a ton of procedure-specific questions. Just some general ones.
> 
> 1) Does "biblios" include full MARC record info?  2) If so, would you say that having "clean" MARC records is important? 3) How automated was the process?  4) How happy was everyone involved with the results of the migration?  4) And perhaps most importantly, how do the librarian's like the Koha system compared to the Follett system?
> 
> Cory A. Jaeger
> Network Manager
> D.C. Everest Area Schools
> 6300 Alderson ST
> Weston, WI  54476
> (715) 359-4221 x1393
> 
> >>> kent <klnasveschuk at klnconsulting.net> 1/30/2006 5:16:22 AM >>>
> Hi Cory,
> Sorry not to get back to you sooner. The version of Follett in use is
> Version 5.00 Rev. 12-01-A Dec 19,2001 running on 5 separate Netware 5.1
> servers. I'm going to post my notes on the Internet shortly. I'll post
> the URL so you can look at the site also. This is not the final version
> to be used for production use.
> 
> What I migrated was biblios and copies from 5 schools. Users come from
> LDAP.
> 
> Kent N
> 
> On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 11:07 -0600, Cory Jaeger wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > In your post at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.koha/5434 you mention that you have "migrated 41,000 records from Follett that runs on Netware to Koha..."  
> > 
> > We are evaluating the possibility of switching from Follett to Koha as well.  Did you migrate from Circ+/Catalog+ or from the older (DOS based) Union catalog, or one of their other products?
> > 
> > Cory A. Jaeger
> > Network Manager
> > D.C. Everest Area Schools
> > 6300 Alderson ST
> > Weston, WI  54476
> > (715) 359-4221 x1393
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
>