In a boon to Australian and New Zealand schools considering the Koha open source integrated library management system, CALYX information essentials recently demonstrated the seamless upload of bibliographic records from SCIS to Koha 3.00.01.
The Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) is a national cataloguing service for Australian, New Zealand and international schools. SCIS customers may access the catalogue records over the Internet via SCISWeb, a product that is used by a large number of schools in Australia and nearly 50% of New Zealand schools.
SCIS provides MARC21 catalogue records in a .dat file. SCIS is a subscription service however a sample file of catalogue records is obtainable from the SCIS website. The file can be saved to the client’s desktop for upload to Koha. In Koha a user chooses the Tools menu to stage MARC records for import. The file location is entered (or the ‘browse’ function enables the file to be located with a couple of mouse clicks) and the file uploaded. After reviewing some decision rules (for example choosing whether records in the import file that match records already in the Koha system should be ignored or used to overwrite the existing records) the user imports the file with another mouse click. Holdings data (bar code, library branch and location information, for example) can be added simply after import.
Koha is a fully featured open source library management system, SCIS compliant and suitable for schools of all sizes.
