Joshua,

Wow! Great answer!

However, as you may have heard, we just had a military coup in Fiji and many
nations have suspended portions of their foreign aid in protest. Long story
short, no money this year. Does anyone know of another way, even if it is
more work for me? Remember, I do not necessarily need MARC output, although
I would prefer it.

-cht


Chris Hammond-Thrasher  MLIS
Library Systems Manager
University of the South Pacific
Suva, Fiji
+679 3232233
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Joshua M. Ferraro
Sent: Friday, 26 January 2007 10:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Getting MARC (or something close) out of Spydus
7.6.3

Hey Chris,

----- Chris Hammond-Thrasher <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I am in charge of an old Spydus 7.6.3 install on HP UNIX out here in
> the South Pacific. Has anyone had experience getting large volumes (or
> even all) records exported out of the system in MARC (or some other
> rational) format?
I've done a few of these now, for clients migrating from Spydus to
Koha. The trick is that Spydus (now Civica) has to 'turn on' their
MARC export routine for you, which they will charge you to do. Once
that's done, the process is fairly straight forward. Here's a brief
overview:

Exporting MARC from Spydus

There are three stages to exporting the MARC data from Spydus.
     Stage 1 - output a batch of records e.g. 10,000
     Stage 2 - check the contents of MARCOUT
     Stage 3 - transfer the MARC records to a Unix file
Batches of 10,000 records or less are recommended since there are over
130,000 bibliographic records and due to the fact that it will take many
hours to output even in batches of 10,000.

At the Main Spydus Menu type MDO

Stage 1 - Create MARC records into the file MARCOUT
Chose option 1 on the menu
     Responses:
     Tape drive or disk? Enter D for DISK
     Output holdings? Y
     Locations? Press <RETURN> for all locations
     Output records with no holdings? Y     (the choice is really up to you)
     Flag records for output? Y
     Output records previously flagged? N
     Number of records to output?  10000
     Press <RETURN> to start the process

Note:
     MARC records are written to the file MARCOUT which has been sized to
hold around 10,000 records
     At the start of each cycle the file MARCOUT is cleared
     At any of the above prompts you can enter a period "." to abort the
process
     MN.MAIN<6> gets the flag B set to prevent the record being output again

Step 2-Checking MARC records
Chose option 2 on the menuy
Enter T for terminal

Stage 3 - Transfer MARC Records to Unix
Chose option 3 on the menu
MARC source file name? MARCOUT
Enter Unix file name? (Wherever you like, example shown below)
enter destination UNIX file name ?/u/sanlib/SL/NELMK1

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

--
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
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