[Koha] Migrating from L4U

[Curtis Rempel]

Hello and Kia ora,

How am I doing so far?  :-)

I'm brand new to koha and working on a project to migrate a small church library (about 3000 items) from L4U to koha running on Debian on Amazon Web Services.  The Linux side of things is the easy part as I've worked with Linux since 1994.  Our goal is to move away from a single user type application loaded on a single laptop to a multi-user web based application accessible from anywhere with additional features.  After doing some research, koha seems to fit our requirements nicely.  

I've done the koha installation a number of times on a virtual test server (to take advantage of snapshot and rollback) to better familiarize myself with the various options, as best I can anyway, not really knowing a Marc record if one fell out of the sky and hit me on the head.  I have also exported patrons (munging the data through a few awk and sed scripts to do data correction and formatting) and Marc records from L4U and imported the same.  As far as I can tell so far, both look ok in koha through my newbie glasses.

I have a few questions (and I'm sure I'll have many more as I go along) such as:

1) For anyone who has done a similar migration from L4U, what has been your experience and do you have any recommendations or things to look out for?

2) I'm not sure that I am able to capture circulation information and transfer that to koha.  If not, would it make more sense to do a gradual migration where items are returned in L4U to then be checked out in koha going forward until all items have been returned?

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.  This will be an interesting project for sure.

Cheers,

Curtis Rempel