[Koha] Multiple bulk imports

[Ian Bays]

  Hi Elaine,

You will need a field to match on.  If ISBN does not work for you then 
some sort of control number should do.  I often use a control number in 
the 001 and set up a matching rule on that field.
If you have no match field it becomes a manual job and others might have 
a better idea how to merge two bib records while keeping items from both 
records along with any other associated loan data etc...

Remember that the biblio matching uses the zebra search indexes so the 
first batch must be loaded and indexed before loading the second batch.

Also (I recall someone had this issue) if you have a batch which itself 
has duplicates by (say) ISBN and you try to load it on an empty 
database, and you want it to de-duplicate the bibs and add the items, 
that won't work.  This is because the matching looks in the zebra 
indexes which are not built at that point.  There are ways to overcome 
this (extract a unique list of ISBNs from the data and make minimal bib 
records with just ISBN, build zebra indexes then load the real data 
matching on ISBN).

Hope that makes sense...

Ian
On 28/09/2010 17:19, Elaine Bradtke wrote:
> Has anyone done their bulk imports in batches?  We've got different
> collections that are in separate databases.  I was planning to import
> each collection separately, because there are slightly different
> things that have to be done to the data in each collection.
> But there's a catch (isn't there always).  There are duplicate copies
> of some the same items across the collections.  It seems logical that
> they should share the same biblio, and have the location, and
> collection information at the item level. How does this work if you
> are importing the different collections in sequence?  A lot of our
> stuff pre-dates ISBN so even identifying them may be a trick.
> However, I was wondering how / if anyone has dealt with this problem.
>


-- 
Ian Bays
Director of Projects
PTFS Europe.com
mobile: +44 (0) 7774995297
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