[Koha] Migration question

[BWS Johnson]

Salve!

Welcome to the kick the tyres phase :D


>We're exploring our options, and one thing we'd like to try would be to
download a couple thousand of 
>our records into Koha and play with it for a while, to see how it fits
our workflow here. I've been surprised 
>that there doesn't seem to be much documentation about uploading
existing data into Koha


*nod* I think you'll find that the best that we could do for that would
be to provide clearer insight into bulkmarcimport, if it still exists.
This would be a job half done from a documentation standpoint, since
users vary in what system they are already using. I wish we had a family
of documentation like Baiju's migration guide for CDS Isis for different
systems such as the ILSs run by Dynix, Voyager, CARL, et cetera. I never
addressed import and export since I was in the enviable position of not
really having quality digital data there for me already. That and I'm
not terribly technical in the first place.



(and, actually, 
>I found the over all Koha documentation rather fragmentary).

When I first started this project a few years back, there was no real
documentation whatsoever. Our diligent developers were way too hard at
work making a better Koha (thanks guys) than to write a guide about the
old one that wouldn't be there. (Not to mention you never really want a
developer writing a manual unless they have superpowers, since they are
too close to the dots to make out the parasols.) If you were to research
Open Source problems, this is a biggy. I think overall it's getting
better, but this still tops some lists that I've seen.

When I figured out what was what for me in terms of using Koha, I wrote
a little guide that was useful to a new user like me. It was better than
nothing at all. From time to time, when I noticed a trend in questions I
received and had caffeine, chocolate, summat orange at my disposal, and
the all important Lots of Time on My Hands, I'd update it to include the
new question in the wiki. (Or more likely, annoy Paul or Stephen with a
text file addition and they'd add it to the wiki.)

As time wore on, the project realised that there were documents out
there, or that folks were willing to help on the thankless job of taming
the documentation monster. So the kohadocs site was born
(www.kohadocs.org), which helped a tonne in gathering the different
threads, but I still think many are left out there. It's an
international project, I *know* I've seen stuff in Russian, and that
stuff isn't on there. Just as I know there's stuff in other Eastern
European nations. But, my dream of seeing at least some documentation in
all of the official languages of the UN is just about fulfilled. Thanks
everyone that made that happen!

With 3.0 an effort was made to get a guide out for the release. So the
3.0 Manual is out there. It is a hulking behemoth. I look at that and
get information overload, but it's there. It took hours, and hours, and
hours of thankless labour. Thanks Nicole!

My bad comes from general laziness and a desire to see 3.0 settle down a
bit before I start to really bang out another updated Newbie's Guide,
which even there, is at least underway. I'm keenly interested in what's
going on with RDA now, and how those massive changes are going to affect
the way we catalogue with Koha in future, even though I'm not a
cataloguer. I have been talking Koha for about the last three days
without much rest. I feel like the discussions I've been having are more
important than writing what I'd view as redundant documentation. I'm
sorry that you find things fragmented, and if you write me off list with
what else you find missing, I'll try to add that to my stuff in future.


I understand in a general way how the bib 
>records would work, but how does Koha deal with holdings/item
records-i.e. barcodes, multi-volume 
>works, multiple copies of the same work, etc.


I know that major changes were slated with how holdings worked in 3.0,
so I don't want to answer that, since I think someone else will probably
have a better idea of what's going on than me. I think you might be
asking after how these things work back end, which I definitely don't
know. For multiple copies in the last version, I just added another
barcode in at the end of the bibliographic entry, and viola, copy 2.

Sorry this probably didn't help very much, but I didn't feel like the
documentation observation was quite fair anymore. We've still got work
to do, but we've come a long way on that, and I felt like a gloss was
warranted. I also wanted you to know why stuff is missing from my own
work.

Cheers,
Brooke 
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