[Koha] Koha VS Home-grown software/database

Fri Aug 6 10:09:42 NZST 2004

Others may correct me, but I found the easiest thing to is to convert my
data to MARC format.

I'm currently running Debian/Sarge.  My experience was not with a
database but with, of all things, someone who stored their data in and
Excel spreadsheet.

First thing I did was to save this as a CSV file.  Based on your email,
I'm guessing you probably can figure out how to do this with your
database.

Then I installed the libxml-csv-perl package.  I simply used the 3-line
"Example #1" from "man XML::CSV" against my CVS file to convert it to
XML.

From there, I installed xalan and created an XSL file to map my new XML
file to XML that conforms to MARC XML (http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim).

Finally, I took the MARC XML file used libmarc-xml-perl_0.65-1_all.deb
to turn it into a traditional MARC record.  This was not in Debian/Sarge,
but it was easily made into a package using dh-make-perl.

I know this sounds like many steps, but it was fairly easy, since I
didn't have to do any programming.  The hardest thing to was the logical
mapping into MARC records.

On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:45:16PM -0400, Bill Benedetto wrote:
> Good day.
> 
> I have what I think is a somewhat unusual question about Koha.
> 
> A couple of years ago my daughter and I created a Library
> Database for our grade school library (Kindergarten through 8th
> grade).
> 
> Since I'm fairly well-versed in the land of Linux, here's the
> infrastructure that we came up with:
> 
>   Debian (Woody)
>   MySQL
>   Perl
> 
> The librarian just wanted something to catalog the books.  She
> didn't want to do check-in/check-out.  Nor did she want anything
> more than Title, Author, Keywords, Section (of the library).  She
> also just wanted to do the Fiction part of the library so
> CallNumber was pretty basic (something like "TWA 3").
> 
> During this library-system creation, I stumbled across Koha.  I
> thought that Koha would be a much better choice than rolling my
> own.  Consequently, I spent a fair amount of time trying to
> figure out how to convert my MySQL DB into Koha's.
> 
> Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to map from my table
> layout to Koha's table layout.
> 
> Now, time has passed, the Library DB is all created and in use.
> (And the librarian really likes it!)  Now, of course, the
> librarian wants a check-in/checkout system.  I may be up to the
> task of modifying my DB and scripts to do this but it seems kind
> of silly to roll my own when a great system like Koha already
> exists.
> 
> So, here's my question, finally.....
> 
> Is it possible for me to take my data and map it to the Koha
> layout?  That is, if I start with a mysqldump of my data, can I
> use Perl to mangle it into a mysqldump of data suitable for
> importing into Koha?
> 
> Yeah, yeah.  I know.  *ANYTHING'S* possible.  But could someone
> possibly provide me with enough guidance (or documentation) so
> that I could do the job?
> 
> Here's my table layout:
> 
>   CREATE TABLE catalog (
>     bookidnum smallint(6) NOT NULL auto_increment,
>     title varchar(75) NOT NULL default '',
>     author varchar(30) NOT NULL default '',
>     keywords varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
>     numcopies tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '1',
>     callnumber varchar(10) NOT NULL default '',
>     hard_paperback char(1) NOT NULL default 'H',
>     section varchar(30) NOT NULL default '',
>     PRIMARY KEY  (bookidnum),
>     UNIQUE KEY bookidnum (bookidnum)
>   ) TYPE=MyISAM;
> 
> Notes:
> 
>  o The bookidnum has nothing to do with the physical book.  It's
>    just basically the record number in the DB.
> 
>  o keywords consists of a string that looks something like "cats
>    christmas" or "mississippi" or "berenstain bears" or
>    "dinosaurs holidays".  We would really like to keep these
>    keywords because that's one of the ways that the
>    librarian/user can search for books.
> 
>  o numcopies is misnamed and is actually the copy number.  The
>    first book is copy #1.  The second is copy #2.  And so on.
> 
>  o hard_paperback is just "H" or "P".
> 
>  o section looks like one of these:
>      Fiction
>      Easy Fiction
>      Intermediate Fiction
>      Non-Fiction
>      Easy Non-Fiction
>      Intermediate Non-Fiction
>      Biography
>      Easy Holidays
>      YA
>      Caldecott
>      Newbery
> 
> I realize that I'm asking a lot here.  What I'm really looking
> for is some kind of one-to-one mapping that says something like
> this:
> 
>   "Your 'bookidnum' field is really field 'bookno' in table 'booktable'"
> 
> so that I might be able to mangle the data from my output to a
> new input for Koha (rather than have to re-enter all of this
> data).  FWIW, we have around 6000 books in this DB.
> 
> I appreciate any guidance that I can get!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Bill Benedetto
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list
> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
> 

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