Koha How-To
Preparing your Data for ILS Migration to Koha
by Enica Davis on Feb 8, 2023
Once you have decided to switch to Koha, there are a few steps you can follow during your migration process with us to ensure a successful experience for you, your staff, and your library.
What happens first?
After you have done the initial data extraction (and have taken a lot of good notes), your migration specialist will review, analyze, and map your data.
Initial Data Review
- During this period, it is important to confirm counts of bibliographic and item records to make sure that you exported everything you needed.
- Your migration specialist will inform you of any missing data as well as any data that might be incorrectly formatted.
Data Analysis
- This is the fun part for us (your migration specialist)! This is where we take a deep dive into your data and present to you all the necessary data points that need to be translated in Koha, which we then turn into a mapping document that we will go over once the implementation starts.
Data Mapping
- One term that you will hear mentioned a lot is mapping. At this stage, what we're doing is taking all the bibliographic, item, and borrower data fields and translating (or mapping) them into their respective Koha fields.
What to expect during the mapping process?
Once the migration specialist is done mapping your data, they will send you documentations that outline what they have found while analyzing and mapping your data. Then, together with your Educator and/or the Aspen specialist, we will go over the documentations during the data/policy meetings to figure out how to best translate your current data into Koha.
The mapping stage of implementation is also a great opportunity for you to clean and streamline your data. If you ever thought about purging old borrower accounts but never found the time to do so, this is your chance!
After we've gone over the mapping documents, we will incrementally load the data from your previous ILS to a test Koha site for you to go over and test.
What do I do during testing?
This is the most important part of the migration process for two reasons: this is where you get to explore Koha a bit more prior to training and, most importantly, refine your data.
You will receive your test site early on in the implementation process. As we load the data incrementally, we highly encourage you to do a lot of exploring in Koha and look at how different borrower and item fields have manifested in Koha. If there is anything that doesn't look quite right, your migration specialist will be happy to refine the data as much as you want until your Koha site looks as close as you expect them to be at the time of your go-live.
Training is done and we found more data updates. Can they still be updated?
At this point in the implementation process, you are most likely about a month or so away from your go-live date. If you find that you need to add anything new and/or update the way you have initially mapped your data, your migration specialist can still do so up until two weeks prior to your go-live weekend. Then, any leftover data updates can be done after your go-live.
At this stage, we would also need to know whether you have added any new codes to your current ILS so your migration specialist can map them appropriately.
We're so close to go-live. Now what?
Your hard work has paid off, you love how Koha looks, and you are excited to go-live (we are too)!
At this time in the migration process, the ByWater implementation team has scheduled a pre-golive call with you and has talked to you about the final data extraction. You will need to do the final extraction of the data the same way you did when you first successfully extracted your data. This is important because your migration specialist relies on the initial data extraction to do the migration properly.
Once the data has been extracted, we encourage you not to add any new data or make any updates to your legacy system. Any updates you make will not be reflected in Koha.
Additional Resources
Read more by Enica Davis