[Koha] data migration from excel to koha

[Robin Sheat]

Op vrijdag 17 december 2010 17:58:35 schreef Koustubha Kale:
> You can use the excellent tool MarcEdit for this. Get it from
> http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php

MarcEdit may work for you. I'm wary of it (and the wiki article) for a few 
reasons. One is that it's closed source and only runs on Windows. Who runs 
legacy platforms like Windows these days ;)

Another is that the post suggests using Excel (that said, you seem to be using 
Excel anyway.) In my experience, the biggest way of losing data is to put it 
though Excel (OpenOffice is safer, but not by a whole lot.) I had an instance 
where putting the data through Excel caused issues such as it treating dates 
wrongly, and thinking ISBNs/ISSNs were numbers (when they're not, as in a 
leading 0 is significant, and converting them to scientific notation is not at 
all helpful to anyone.) With care you can do it, but be careful. My guideline 
is that if you can at all avoid using a spreadsheet, do so. They tend to do 
more harm than good, as they're not databases.

It's a little confused as it suggests converting Unicode to UTF-8...UTF-8 is a 
representation of Unicode. But, I expect that it's still safe to do as it says 
about that.

Anyway, it's probably easier to use to get started than my script, so see how 
you go.
-- 
Robin Sheat
Catalyst IT Ltd.
✆ +64 4 803 2204
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