[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Feature request: importing titles from Follett Library applications

[Jason Etheridge]

On 1/30/07, Paul Bartell <paul.bartell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Type of audience: catalogers of libraries currently using follett ILS
> Size of audience: unknown
> Use case: Mrs.G, a librarian at a small private school, has a student who is
> into open source. This tells her about an open source ils. She is sort of
> interested, but doesn't want to have to hand type all the data in for the
> thousands of books in the library. They are currently paying lots of money
> for this ILS.

Hi Paul, to pursue this we would likely need a lot of help from you.
You'll have to determine how encumbered your organization is
contractually with Follett, whether you have a right to use or talk
about their export tools, and whether you even own your data.  I
wouldn't expect a lot of barriers here, but you never know.

Just from googling, it does look like they have a way to export MARC21
for bibliographic data and can include holding information in a MARC
format.  This is good.  Patron data is a bit murkier.  There really
isn't a library standard for that (as far as I know), but as long as
any export is consistent and structured, we can map it to Evergreen.

If anyone else has an interest in this and wants to jump in, or wants
to share their own import stories, please do so!  We might also want
to move this thread over to OPEN-ILS-DEV.

Thanks!

-- 
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/