[Koha] Advice on barcode replacement/central catalog

[Jeramey Valley]

5 buildings with each their own library. 1 is using Koha now, the rest are being migrated this summer. We are going with a central catalog. Barcodes are not currently unique across the libraries, so we are generating new barcodes and replacing every barcode on every item this summer.

My question revolves around bringing these “new” libraries into our existing Koha system.

If I import the current material set from one of the new libraries, how difficult is the process to batch-update the barcodes from an external data soure? 

We have a separate program that will be used to scan in the current material barcode, parse and process it, then spit out a new, library-specific barcode. This process will have the biblio and original barcode plus new barcode that we can then put into a comma separated file to “batch update” Koha, but we’ve not tried to do that. Is that possible?

Biblio number - is that internal and generated by Koha or is that something that would import from the original Material database (I don’t recall)?

Is it better to process the barcodes in the material file before importing them into Koha, so that we would not be importing, then batch-changing within Koha? 

All thoughts much appreciated.


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Regards, 

Jeramey Valley
Network Manager, Bullock Creek Schools
valleyj at bcreek.org