Chapter 23. Migrating from a legacy system

Table of Contents

Making electronic resources visible in the catalog
Migrating your bibliographic records
Migrating your call numbers, copies, and parts

When you migrate to Evergreen, you generally want to migrate the bibliographic records and copy information that existed in your previous library system. For anything more than a few thousand records, you should import the data directly into the database rather than use the tools in the staff client. While the data that you can extract from your legacy system varies widely, this section assumes that you or members of your team have the ability to write scripts and are comfortable working with SQL to manipulate data within PostgreSQL. If so, then the following section will guide you towards a method of generating common data formats so that you can then load the data into the database in bulk.

Making electronic resources visible in the catalog

Electronic resources generally do not have any call number or copy information associated with them, and Evergreen enables you to easily make bibliographic records visible in the public catalog within sections of the organizational unit hierarchy. For example, you can make a set of bibliographic records visible only to specific branches that have purchased licenses for the corresponding resources, or you can make records representing publicly available electronic resources visible to the entire consortium.

Therefore, to make a record visible in the public catalog, modify the records using your preferred MARC editing approach to ensure the 856 field contains the following information before loading records for electronic resources into Evergreen:

Table 23.1. 856 field for electronic resources: indicators and subfields

Attribute Value Note

Indicator 1

4

Indicator 2

0 or 1

Subfield u

URL for the electronic resource

Subfield y

Text content of the link

Subfield z

Public note

Normally displayed after the link

Subfield 9

Organizational unit short name

The record will be visible when a search is performed specifying this organizational unit or one of its children. You can repeat this subfield as many times as you need.


Once your electronic resource bibliographic records have the required indicators and subfields for each 856 field in the record, you can proceed to load the records using either the command-line bulk import method or the MARC Batch Importer in the staff client.