Good morning Donald,
On Fri Mar 8 07:52:19 2013, Donald Butterworth wrote:
Colleagues,
We are approaching the point of migrating records from our Symphony
system into Evergreen, and we are unsure what the best method is to
accomplish this.
We have migrated several different ILS systems to Evergreen. In fact,
our next library is running Symphony. Actually, I've not had a chance
to look at their data in detail and am a bit perplexed about how to
neatly retrieve a csv of patron information and/or circulations...
We use the same general approach to migrations no matter what the
system - we follow the community documentation (the 2.1 version
specifically) but have adapted/added to it as we've gone along. We also
got a great jump start by visiting the folks at Evergreen Indiana (who
have 100 or so libraries online) and checking out how they do it.
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.
If you aren't happy with your setup in Symphony you probably won't like
it in Evergreen. Massaging the data _is_ work, but it could prove to be
easier than trying to shoehorn Symphony's setup into Evergreen. We
massage.
I have to say that method number two make me very nervous because I
remember that making global changes in our former “Horizon” system was
virtually impossible. Here are some of the questions we are confronting:
·* What is the best way to simply re-label an Org Unit? For example
changing the value ATSFLA to ATS-DCL?
·* What about circulation modifiers? What is the best approach to
changing the values DVD to dvd, FAC-MED to dvd, and ARC-MED to dvd?
·* In Symphony we currently have two “Libraries” one for the main
campus and one for a branch. But in Evergreen we want to take
advantage of the “sub-library” option for our Archives and two other
satellite collections. The Symphony “match points” that can be used to
identify these sub-libraries are called “Home Location” and “Current
Location”. What would be the best way to approach this problem, short
of a light gun and a laptop?
During migrations we handle all of these sorts of things with "mapping
documents". During our initial implementation discussions with the
library we create a set of spreadsheets (or we go back later with
sheets based on what we find in the data). These spreadsheets are used
to map individual legacy "columns" or combinations of columns to their
Evergreen equivalents. Then it's just spreadsheet -> tsv -> postgres
:-) It's easier than you'd think to collect this information and once
you've got it - and your item information - into staging tables on the
database you can run queries to update all of your items very quickly.
· * 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.
If the items have an 856 field, then you can use the "located URI's"
feature. By adding a subfield 9 (or multiples) to the 856's containing
the shortname of an org unit it will cause it to appear in OPAC
searches despite the lack of physical copies.
The other method to show itemless records in the OPAC is by making them
"transcendent". I'm a little fuzzy on this one unfortunately because we
don't use it. This works for records without an 856, but will show in
the entire OPAC rather than only in selected org units. You need to
create a new "bib source" and turn on transcendency for that source.
Then you'd set the source of your "analytic" records to use this
source. At the time we looked at this feature you had to create the new
source by adding a row to the config.bib_source table of the database
but there may be a UI for it now in the staff client.
Regards,
Justin Hopkins
MOBIUS
573-808-2309
