[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Importing MARC records

[Dan Scott]

2008/5/5 Tom Patterson <tpatterson at tfc.edu>:
> I have a new Evergreen setup and need to import records. I have looked at the information located here:
>  http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:importing:bibrecords, downloaded the sample scripts and reviewed the README file. My question is whether proceeding along this path is the easiest way to import these records and are there any caveats?

Hi Tom:

For just a handful of records you could use the Z39.50 import from the
client to copy catalogue records - but otherwise, the page & sample
scripts you pointed to are really the only method I know of importing
a large batch of records. So all I can offer are some caveats.

If you have a large number of bib records to import, you can just pipe
the output of marc2bre.pl | direct_ingest.pl | parallel_pg_loader.pl
to speed up the process.

As for processing the holdings inside the MARCXML records, if you can
separate out the holdings into their own file with a consistent
identifying key for bib record -> holding, then that's probably a
better approach in the long run.

You also don't want to have your holdings sitting inside your bib
records in the database once they're imported. It will inflate the
size of your database with no positive benefits. If your exported bibs
do contain the holdings in, say, a 949 field, you can use the --trash
parameter in marc2bre.pl to delete that field before it gets imported
into the database.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University