[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Data migration – Best practices

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Donald Butterworth
<don.butterworth at asburyseminary.edu> wrote:
> Based on insights from the listserv and some serious cogitation, we have
> created hierarchies, parameters, and values that we hope will take advantage
> of Evergreen’s architecture. All along my expectation has been that we would
> export records from Symphony, take the data found in the 999 tag and massage
> it until it matches the values of our new Evergreen structures, and then do
> an import. However, recently it has been suggested that a better method
> would be to take the structures and values we currently have in Symphony and
> duplicate them (as much as possible) in Evergreen. Then once, the data is in
> Evergreen, change the values into what we really want them to be.

In my experience, it's much easier to do mapping of policies and
policy codes as part of the migration rather than attempt to exactly
duplicate the previous ILS's setup followed by lots of global changes.
 There is a place for post-migration data cleanup, but it's better to
try to limit that to tasks (such as an inventory or weeding project)
that require looking at the physical items.

> ·       *  Is it true that all bibliographic records must have attached
> item/copy records in order for the bib record to appear in the public PAC?
> We have several thousand “analytic” records that have no attached item/copy
> records.

Evergreen's conjoined items feature, which is documented at
<http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.3/_conjoined_items.html>, may help
you here.  This feature lets you link an item record to multiple
bibliographic records, so if you've got a record with item for the
host volume and a set of analytic records, linking that item to the
analytics will cause them to display in the OPAC.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
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Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
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