[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Importing marc records from Sirsi

[Dan Scott]

Hi Robert:

2008/5/28 Robert <glibrarysystem at gmail.com>:
> Now that I have my permission problems out of the way, thanks to Dan, Jason
> and Mike, I can finally start on something that has been hindering the
> progression of our testing. I have some records that we exported from Sirsi
> and looking at the documentation about importing, I was able to run all of
> the commands to convert the records into the JSON records that Evergreen
> uses. Unfortunately when I came to the step to create the SQL statements to
> import the records the only SQL statements that I get are:
> SET CLIENT_ENCODING TO 'UNICODE';
>
> BEGIN;
>
> COMMIT;
>
> That is all that is in the sql file. It doesn't import any of the records,
> obviously. I was wondering if anyone that has successfully imported records
> from Sirsi could give me some insight on what to do to generate the SQL
> statements needed to import the records. I am including a copy of the file
> that I am trying to convert using the commands on the import section in the
> documentation. The file itself may not be in the correct format orignally to
> convert it correctly. I am not familiar with all of the formats and could
> use some insight on that as well. I tried to convert it as if it were in
> UNICODE format, if that helps. Any help on this subject is greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Again my Evergreen installation is 1.2.1.4 on Debian Etch using 1.2.1.4
> client.

What instructions are you following for the import? You've attached a
file in MARC21 format; if you follow the Gutenberg example at
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:importing:bibrecords
then everything should work, in theory, because the Gutenberg records
begin in MARC21 format.

If you're using the import_holdings demo from
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib/wiki/ImportDemo  then you
have to convert the MARC21 files to MARCXML format first before you'll
have any success with that approach. The demo starts with MARC21XML
files in UTF-8 format. If you want to follow along with the demo, run
a command like the following if your MARC files are already in UTF-8
encoding:

yaz-marcdump -i marc -o marcxml input.marc > output.marc

or something like the following to convert them from MARC8 encoding to
UTF-8 as well:

yaz-marcdump -i marc -o marcxml input.marc -f marc8 -t utf8 -l9=97 > output.marc

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University