Phew, sitting on your backside all day can be quite tiring. Today, I spent most of the morning working out how to get the library database entries into OpenBiblio. I chose 2 entries from the Excel spreadsheet and saved them as CSV files. Then, I used a tool called MARCedit to convert the CSV files into MARC readable files. Once in this format, the files can be imported into OpenBiblio. Unfortunately I had a problem in realising that the first time you import data, the default is set for "Test Load: True". In other words, it doesn't actually import the data, it just shows you what it would look like if it did it correctly. I finally gave in trying to work out what was wrong and asked the Dog. Of course, I should have clicked the button for "Test Load: False", and indeed when I did that, all the data was imported as if by magic.
Most of the hard work assigning MARC tags to the old database fields was done yesterday, but some tags weren't correct, so I had to go back and find them on the official website. This has been truly testing my memory of what I learned all those years ago at library school in Ealing.
Now I need to work out how to break down the data into importable sections. Hopefully the Dog will be able to write a bit of code to help seperate multiple data items within fields.
This afternoon, I spent reading up on barcodes and accession numbers. Each book in the library will need to have an accession number and a barcode attached to it, before we can use a barcode reader to check the books in and out. I don't think that the system will be usable until September 2007.