[Koha] transferring records to koha

[Roger Hart]

I would like to ask for some help on transferring bibliographic  
records into koha.

I agreed to do some volunteer work at our child's new school, a small  
private academy, and I was aghast to see that one of the tasks was  
typing -- by hand -- bibliographic records into what turned out to be  
terribly out-of-date PC library program that lacked not just MARC  
import capabilities but could only be accessed from a single  
terminal, etc.

After doing some research, it seemed to me that koha might be the  
best library program for them. Am I correct in this?

I've managed to set up koha on an old Apple PowerBook G4 I have at  
home running Mac OS X Server 10.4. After some effort, most everything  
seems to be working, including MARC imports.

Now I would like to transfer their old records into koha. There are  
almost 10,000. I could try to do this by mapping the fields (they are  
tab-delimited) to koha's and using MySQL to import. However, their  
bibliographic records are, as you might guess, incomplete and  
idiosyncratic (especially in the subject headings, for example). So  
it seems to me that it might be better, if it is not too difficult,  
to try to use the author, title, and perhaps date fields from their  
old records to download standardized MARC records, from LOC for  
example, by perhaps modifying one of the koha perl scripts; then I  
would like to use a perl script to assign the barcode they have used  
to each item, and perhaps place the old information in a "notes"  
section. Can anyone give me some guidance on whether this seems  
feasible, and if so, any suggestions on how I might best accomplish  
this?

Thanks so much,

Roger

********************************

Roger Hart
Assistant Professor, Departments of History and Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin

office: Room 470, Burdine Hall
office phone: 512-475-7258
department fax: 512-475-7222
email: rhart at mail.utexas.edu
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rhart

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