Tip of the Week

Tip for: 03.03.03

For a video clip demonstrating Importing Books from a Vendor Disk in v5.44 click here for Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. (Quicktime required)

Importing books from a vendor disk

One of the ways that we can save time as librarians is by purchasing the catalog records for items we order from a vendor. This keeps us from having to enter each item by hand ourselves, thus freeing up time to collaborate with teachers or to do the many other tasks that librarians have.

The records will arrive either on a 3.5'' disk or a CD. To add these new items to your collection you will need to follow a few simple steps.

Place the disk in the appropriate drive of the computer.

With Alexandria running, select Import from the File menu.

Using the drop-down menu at the top of the selection window, choose the appropriate drive.

Highlight the file to be imported and click Open.

The file will then appear in the import window to be imported into the collection.

Click on the tab marked Items, to verify that the settings are correct for the information that was sent from the vendor. Make sure that the Archive First box is checked.

Then, click on the Start Import button. For those using v5.44 this is the green arrow on the bottom right of the window.

Once the import is complete you can click the Close button.

Look over the Transaction Log and make sure that each item was added or updatedappropriately. If the import was large, you may need to open the log file on the hard drive.

New to 5.44 is an additional step for those customers whose records include diacritical characters such as occur in French and Spanish. There is a Browse tab on the Import Settings screen. Click on this tab to preview the records. Look for any accented characters and choose the appropriate character set for the file you are importing. Until you click on the Start Import button, you can continue changing character sets until you find the one that works for your file. Mac, Windows, and MARC files can each use different representations for the same accented character. Choosing the incorrect character set will cause the accented characters to appear incorrectly and will affect how they are indexed for searching and sorting.

Note: If you see an entry that says update copy, the file that was imported contained a duplicate barcode. If the file was supposed to only contain new copies and no updates, then you will need to restore your archive, and either contact technical support to assist you in changing your import settings to rebarcode the entire import or only those copies that are duplicates or contact your vendor for a corrected file with the correct barcodes. It is very important to avoid giving vendors a duplicate barcode range or using barcodes within the range you have given them.

It is important to make sure that you either run a back up or check the Archive First box prior to starting the import. That way if there is any problems with the import you can go back to the archive or backup of your data prior to the import. The other thing to be aware of is that you can view a file prior to importing it by highlighting the file in the import window and then clicking on the View File button that appears when a file is selected. This allows you to make sure that the proper records in the file to be imported.

In addition, if you are comfortable dragging and dropping a file, you can drag and drop the file to be imported onto the Circulation window's transaction log and it will bring up the import window without having to go through all of the steps listed above.

We hope this will help as you work with the disks that come from vendors to be added to your collections.

Thank You,
The Alexandria Staff Librarians