[Koha] KOHA Newbies/ Winnebago Spectrum conversion

[Cindy Murdock]

Hi Barbara,

Our library system of 9 libraries migrated to Koha from Winnebago 
Circ/Cat over the course of a year or two.  Depending on the size of 
your collection, you probably don't have to close during a conversion.  
When I migrated each of our libraries, I generally gave myself a week or 
two to tweak the MARC records, importing those ahead of time (in which I 
put a freeze on adding or deleting new items to the old circ system) and 
then after the library would close on a Saturday afternoon I would 
import the rest of their data over the course of the weekend.  Generally 
it would take a few hours.  Of course, before I did all this I did 
numerous practice runs to make sure all would go smoothly.  If you're 
doing the migration & support of Koha yourself, you should definitely 
set up one or more test systems to thoroughly familiarize yourselves 
with the migration process as well as Koha itself.

Also, Kyle Hall, on our IT staff, wrote a collection of scripts for our 
conversion that you might find useful, although they were written for 
the dev_week version of Koha, not 3.0.  You can find them here:  
http://kylehall.info/index.php/projects/koha-tools/

As for problems & MARC tweaking, you'll definitely want to make sure 
your records are properly encoded in UTF-8.  I've found yaz-marcdump 
useful for that.  You'll also need to set up your MARC frameworks in 
Koha to match your records, and/or tweak your records with MarcEdit 
before importing them.

Cheers,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cindy Murdock
IT Services Director
Meadville Public Library    | CCFLS
http://meadvillelibrary.org | http://ccfls.org



Barbara Keef wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Our public library is in the early planning stages of migration to KOHA from 
> Winnebago/SPECTRUM.
>
> Can any of the public libraries on this list-serv offer "advice" as far as 
> preparation for this migration?
>
> Q: Do we need to close during a conversion?
> Q: What is the average time for conversion as experienced by other
> libraries?
> Q: Are there any common problems we should look out for that other
> libraries may have gone through during the conversion process?
> Q. Is there any tweaking of our MARC records that would make the process 
> smoother?
>
> Thanks for any help.
> Barbara Keef
>
>
> Barbara L. Keef
> Reference/Technology Librarian
> Windham Public Library
> 217 Windham Center Road
> Windham, Maine 04062
> 207-892-1908 
>
>
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