[Koha] Millenium to Koha Data Migration

[Ruth Bavousett]

Annalise,

I've had occasion to do a number of Millennium to Koha migrations;
Millennium is one of the harder systems to migrate, particularly if you try
to deal with acquisitions and serials.  If you're doing biblios, items,
borrowers, current checkouts, holds, and fines, that's not too terribly
evil, but there's no such thing as an "easy" migration from Millennium.
 There are some that are merely less-hard.

Extracting the MARC records is not too bad; use conventional MARC21 format,
and don't have it include item data.  You'll need to make sure you have
some match point in the biblio--either the OCLC number in 001 or 035, or
have the script put the biblio number (BIB #) in a 9xx field that is
otherwise unused (if you can set up the export profile to do that).  Then
export item fields in a tab-delimited report, and using that match point
(for my recent ones, we used OCLC # in 001) use a script to put the items
into the biblio in Koha's 952 format.

Most other things can be exported into tab-delimited files, and then a
script can be used to insert that into Koha.  For currently-checked-out
items, for instance, you'll want the barcode of the item, the barcode of
the patron, the date it went out, the date it is due, and optionally, the
number of renewals it has had and the date last renewed.

They key to sanity in any migration from this system (indeed, of most) is
the quality of your match points for all the different bits of data,
because of the quirk of the reporting system that only allows a certain
number of columns to be exported in a tab-delimited report at once.
 Barcodes are exceptional good match points.  ISBN/ISSN/OCLC numbers are a
little less high-quality, but usually pretty good, and borrower names and
book titles are *terrible* match points.

Please feel free to contact me off-list; there are some scripts and things
that might be useful to you in your import that I have laying about, and
I'm happy to answer questions.

*D Ruth Bavousett*
Lead Migration Specialist
ByWater Solutions
Support and Consulting for Open Source Software
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, CA
Office: Lawrence, KS
Phone/Fax (888)900-8944
http://bywatersolutions.com
ruth at bywatersolutions.com



On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Annalise Berdini <
annalise.berdini at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I work in a public library using III Millennium, software release 2011 1.2,
> release date June 2012. We are part of a consortium using Millennium and as
> such, we would need to contact the Millennium administrator in order to
> obtain the data in the best format possible for transfer into the latest
> version of Koha. I do have an old MARC dump from 4 years ago, available to
> view on the Internet Archive, located here:
> http://archive.org/details/CollingswoodLibraryMarcDump10-27-2008, which I
> have been using to test out on a Koha demo. However, it was simply
> formatted for storage purposes and as such is not in the optimal format for
> transfer into Koha. Has anyone worked on a transfer from III Millennium to
> Koha before, and if so, what are some suggestions for facilitating the data
> migration? How should we have the Millennium administrator format the MARC
> data in order to make for an easy transfer? Any help or advice would be
> greatly appreciated.
>
> Annalise Berdini
> Collingswood Public Library
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