[Koha] Import query

[S P Suresh]

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