This document describes the process of migrating data from the proprietary Libsys ILMS to the open source Koha ILMS at the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) library in India. Key steps included: 1) Generating reports from Libsys and converting them to Excel files 2) Cleaning the data by removing blanks and consolidating multi-line fields 3) Converting the Excel files to MARC format files 4) Importing the MARC files into Koha 5) Customizing Koha's interface, administration tools, and OPAC to meet NISCAIR's needs.

1. Libsys 7 to Koha
Data Migration , Customization & Implementation
of Open Source ILMS
CHAITANYA PRATAP
SINGH
MASTER OF COMPUTER
APPLICATIONS,
SOUTH ASIAN UNIVERSITY, NEW
DELHI

2. ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION
 National Institute of Science Communication and
Information Resources (NISCAIR), located at New
Delhi, India, is one of the premier information science
institutes in India under the umbrella of CSIR (Council of
Scientific and Industrial Research) that comprise 38 other
labs/institutes of different disciplines spread across the
country.
 NISCAIR came into existence on 30 September 2002 with
the merger of National Institute of Science
Communication (NISCOM) and Indian National
Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC). Both
NISCOM and INSDOC, the two premier institutes of the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), were
devoted to dissemination and documentation of S&T
information, respectively.

3. PROJECT STRUCTURE
CSIR has proposed to develop a CSIR wide knowledge gateway that
will have the following modules
CSIR-Cloud
 Capacity and Capability Building: CSIR Open Source Cloud Computing
Infrastructure and Open Source Software Technology Solution Cell
CSIR-Cat
 CSIR Distributed Library/Virtualized Union OPAC of CSIR Holdings,
using Z39.50 protocol & Open Source Integrated Library Management
Software
CSIR-Trend
 Multi-dimensional Analysis System (MDAS) - Extended information
access for enabling excellence

4. OBJECTIVE OF CSIR-CAT
 To Implement Open Source Integrated Library System
software Koha at the place of proprietary software
which are already in use.
 To do federated search in Koha for distributed libraries
i.e. 39 National Libraries of India.

5. NEED OF KOHA
 The open source software solutions are very cost effective as
compared to proprietary software solutions this initiative will
also boost-up the movement of open source in India and thus
the millions of Rupees can be saved on software.
 Libsys- Rs. 4,50,000
 They charge Rs. 10,000 on each arrival.
 You have to purchase different modules otherwise it will not
work.

6. CSIR-CAT
Things to be done in CSIR-CAT
 Koha Customization & Implementation
 Migration of data from Libsys 7.0 to Koha
 OPAC Customization

7. WHY CSIR-CAT?
1. Reduction of cost of ownership of ILMS
2. Networking of CSIR KRCs
3. Implementation of uniform & international standard across all CSIR
KRCs like MARC 21, Z39.50 so that data can be migrated to any
other format
4. Avoid vendor locking for ILMS by using open source software
5. Increase in efficiency for Information Scientists due to reduced
classification efforts of knowledge managers/ information scientists
by importing/sharing catalogues from each other or from other
online sources like library of congress
6. Optimum utilization/sharing of information resources through
ILL available in KRCs
7. Avoid duplication of resources like books, monographs, reports,
thesis, standards, patents, etc among CSIR KRC

8. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
CSIR-CAT
Data Migration Federated Search

9. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

10. DATA MIGRATION
PROCESS

11. ISSUES WITH LIBSYS
1. There is no support from LibSys as it paid service
2. All modules are not purchased
3. Export / import module is not working
4. Libsys 7.0 stores data in RDBMS but NPL library do not
have access to database management system which is placed in
IT Division
5. Only information available is terms of reports which are
available in text files
6. In text files, regional language data is not directly readable
7. No information is available in public how it has been stored
8. OPAC module is not operational

12. HOW DATA HAS BEEN MIGRATED
FROM LIBSYS7 TO KOHA?
1. Generated multiple text report files with different filelds.
Accession number is printed in all the files to join them
latter on. It took three days because connection was too slow
2. Converted these text files to excel
3. Removed headers, footers and blank rows through macro
4. Converted these files in RDBMS tables

13. CONT…
5. Processed records through program to make proper rows
(data got printed in multiple rows so it was concatenated)
6. joined all the processed tables
7. converted back to excel
8. koha need .mrc files therefore “MarcEdit tool” was used
which took excel file generated at step 7 as input

14. DATA COLLECTION MODEL
1. Bibliographic Record
2. Authority Record
3. Patron Record
4. Serial Record
5. Acquisition Record
6. Circulation Record

15. PROBLEM AND SOLUTION WHILE
FETCHING THE DATA OF LIBSYS 7.0
 As the existing software does not provide import/export
feature, but it does provide report generation to a file.
During this process we took the output as a text file covering
all the fields in the catalogue such as,
 Title;
 authors;
 edition;
 place of publication;
 publisher name;
 year;
 pagination;
 ISBN;
 class number;
 book number;
 accession number;

16. DATA CLEANING
 Generated multiple reports with different
columns,
 Trimmed the extra space between the words,
 Deleted all blank lines
 Wrote a program to bring multi-line text to single
line,
 If title was distributed in 3 lines then we
converted that multi-line to single line

17. FORMATTING OF THE TEXT FILE
 Figure 1. Original text file (accession number, title and author
field).

18. Figure 2: Original text file (accession number, edition, publisher
location,
publisher name and year of publishing).

19. PROBLEM IN TEXT FILE
N-Number of blank lines are present, data shown is having slash to
distinguish author and title but in some records we don’t have slash also

20. CONT…

21. TEXT IN HINDI

22. IMPORTING TEXT INTO EXCEL

23. SOLUTION :
In order to solve this we wrote macro’s for
1. Deleting blank lines
2. Deleting page numbers
3. Bringing the record in a Single Line with
correct Access number

24. MACRO FOR DELETING BLANK
ROWS
 Sub DeleteBlankRows()
 ' This macro deletes all rows on the active worksheet
 ' that have no value in column D.
 Dim iRow As Long
 Dim LastRow As Long
 LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count +
ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Row - 1
 For iRow = LastRow To 1 Step -1
 If Cells(iRow, 1) = "" And Cells(iRow, 2) = "" And Cells(iRow, 3) = "" And
Cells(iRow, 4) = "" And Cells(iRow, 5) = "" Then Rows(iRow).Delete
 If Cells(iRow, 1) <> "" And Cells(iRow, 2) = "" And Cells(iRow, 3) = "" And
Cells(iRow, 4) = "" And Cells(iRow, 5) = "" Then Rows(iRow).Delete
 Next iRow
 End Sub

25. MERGING INTO EXCEL
Figure 3: Multiple spreadsheets merged to form a single spreadsheet
(control number, accession number/barcode, title, author, isbn,
publishing location, class number, publisher name and
pagination).

26. CONVERTING FROM EXCEL FORMAT
INTO .MRK FORMAT

27. You will be prompted for mapping the fields to
recognize the fields by standard marc format.
Suppose for Field 0 that is first column I
entered Map to: 008 (control number) and then
click on Apply.

28. MAPPING OF FIELDS TO MARC TAGS

29. ADDITION OF DELETION OF ANY
FIELD

30. .MRK FILE

31. MRK STRUCTURE FOR SINGLE
RECORD
=LDR 00421nam a2200193Ia 45e0
=001 1
=003 CSIR-NISTADS
=008
130228s9999xx0000undd
=040 $aCSIR-NISTADS$cCSIR-NISTADS
=100 $aBrown, Michael Barratt
=245 $aEconomics of Imperialism
=260 $aLondon
=260 $bPenguin
=300 $a380
=500 $a1
=850 $aCSIR-NISTADS
=902 $a335.412, BRO
=942 $cBK
=952 $p1

32. CONVERT .MRK FILE TO .MRC
 Convert .mrk file into raw Marc format that can
be directly imported into Koha.
 For this again open MarcEdit and Select MARC
Tools.
 Next Select MarcMaker to convert .mrk file
into .mrc format.
 Locate your input file and name your output file.
Then Click Execute.

33. CONVERTING .MRK FILE TO .MRC

34. .MRC FILE

35. ABOUT KOHA
 Koha is an integrated library system (ILS)
 It was the first open source ILS.
 Koha was created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for
the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand.
 The first installation went live in January of 2000.

36. KOHA SCRIPT
 We have made a script to install koha on CentOS, which
makes it easy to install and saves time and effort.

37. LOGIN PAGE

38. CUSTOMIZED KOHA MAIN PAGE

39. IMPORTING RECORDS IN KOHA

40. CATALOGING

41. ADVANCE SEARCH PAGE

42. Z39.50 SEARCH

43. OPAC CUSTOMIZATION

44. ADMINISTRAION

45. OPAC CONFIGURATION
 Decide how you want your OPAC to look and
what content you want on the main page.
 Create a library branded stylesheet using CSS.
 Create a custom XSLT stylesheet to change the
way search results and bibliographic records
appear in the OPAC.
 Define OPAC system preferences.
 Set up your cron jobs.

46. OPAC SEARCH PAGE

47. OPAC SEARCH

48. PROBLEM WITH Z39.50
1. Implementation not easy
2. Does not scale well (if nodes > 100)
3. Network bandwidth
4. Z39.50 implementation at client
(“Origin’) end
5. Time Consuming
6. Slow Processing
7. All Servers should be on.

49. ARCHITECTURE
DESIGN

50. LEVEL 0 DFD OF KOHA

51. LEVEL 1 DFD

52. Flowchart of Koha

53. CONCLUSION & FUTURE
WORK
 Data from proprietary software migrated to Koha.
 Barcode Scanner will be attached.
 Now Union catalogue for distributed libraries will be
made by using oai-pmh protocol and harvester for
federated searching.
 Using harvester, data can be converted back to marc
for implementing Z39.50 protocol in koha for
importing records from distributed libraries.

54. THANK YOU
