[Koha] Importing barrowing information

[Magnus Enger]

2009/11/8 Br. Francis Therese Krautter <br.ftherese at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
> I am still working on importing data into koha.  We have a rather large
> database and I am trying to move it over, most of it has moved so far, but
> one major importation I can't figure out how do is all the currently
> borrowed books.  I can't find a marc field or a koha variable that looks
> like it contains this information.  There are over 1000 books currently
> checked out, I really don't want to have to do it by hand!
> -BFT

Hi!

I had this same problem on behalf of a customer recently. What I did
was i massaged the "current loans" (about 12.000 of them) exported
from their old system into the format that the "Offline Circulation
Utility" expects. Then I imported the loans with the "Offline
Circulation File (.koc) Uploader". Have a look at the relevant part of
the manual towards the bottom of this page:
http://koha.org/documentation/manual/3.2/circulation/offline-circulation-utility
Don't worry about installing the actual offline client for now, what
you want to do is just to re-create the format of the file that the
client creates - it's documented here:
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=koha_offline_circulation_file_format

This approach seems to have worked well, and it means you don't have
to worry about putting all the right things in all the right fields in
all the right tables in the database, as you would if you were going
to create some SQL to import the data...

On the other hand, this approach means you need the barcode of the
patron and the barcode of the book in order to import the loan. In my
case I only had the patronID and the itemID in the file of exported
current loans, so I had to combine data from the MARC-dump (to turn
itemIDs into item barcodes) and the exported list of patrons (to turn
patronIDs into patron barcodes) to get the result I wanted.

Regards,
Magnus Enger
libriotech.no