[Koha] Switching from Other Library Software to Koha

[Catherine Kerrigan]

Hi folks!

Chiming in rather late on this discussion and although I don't have experience in AccessIT, I am currently in the process of migrating from an Australian system called Bookmark to Koha.  Bookmark, like AccessIT, does not export in MARC format.  Instead, it exports catalogue and holdings data in a TXT file.  I copied/pasted the TXT file into an Excel spreadsheet.  As Bookmark's catalogue records are not MARC-compliant, I then had to strip out a lot of the data to produce brief catalogue/holdings records and then used MarcEdit to convert into MARC records that could be imported into Koha.  I am now adding the holdings data manually to the catalogue records, which is a very tedious but doable process as I only had 3.5k items - Bookmark has a separate catalogue record for each item so I have a lot of duplicates to delete later on. I was fortunate in that I didn't have any patron or circulation records to export.  And I had previously exported full catalogue records from Libraries Australia and, when I imported them into Koha, used a matching rule of ISBN to replace the brief catalogue records when they were imported.

What I have learnt from this process is that I could have saved myself a lot of effort by ensuring that the Default MARC framework in Koha was complete, especially the 9xx fields, so that I could map the Bookmark fields to the appropriate Koha fields.  This is particularly important when using MarcEdit to convert the records.  I found that the holdings data did not transfer across correctly because of mapping issues (hence the tedious manual input).

I did look at the Perl csv-to-MARC utility but my IT skills were not up to that.  MarcEdit worked very nicely for me once I got the hang of it (it took a few tries and a realisation going home one night that I needed to delete the header row from my Excel spreadsheet to get it to work properly).

Hopefully, the above will give you some idea of how you might be able to move from AccessIT.

Cheers!

Catherine

Catherine Kerrigan  :::  Librarian and Projects Officer
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