ATTN: Lex Users and Librarians
SUBJECT: Importing Patron Records in Excel-CSV format


GENERAL CONCERNS WHEN IMPORTING PATRON RECORDS
Public schools and colleges of sufficient size often like to import their
patron data from the department handling student registration.

Before doing this the library should think about transactions already on
file. If the student iD numbers of the imported records are new, the former
patrons may be duplicated after importing the new data file. Further if the
former patrons have outstanding transactions, they cannot be removed from
the system until the transactions are taken off the system.

Here is a process that works quite well to handle that problem:

If you are erasing your old patron file and adding a new one, you should
a. Backup your patron and circ files
b. Print out an on-loan report.
c. Print out a fines report
d. Check in outstanding items, and pay fines, or move them over to a
manual system of some kind.
e. Erase your old patron records
f. Add your new patron records.
g. Add last year's <outstanding> loans back to the system
h. Deal with last year's fines in paper form only."

One other approach would be to accept a few duplicates and correct the
situation
later. This would be acceptable where the number of patrons is not large.

IMPORTING PATRON RECORDS IN EXCEL-CSV FORMAT

If you "export Excel records" to a text file you will receive your data in a
format that will look like this when viewed in Notepad with the "word wrap"
turned off:

12333, Smith, Joe, 1111 Green Street, Mytown, SK, S0L 1Z0
12334, Jones, Suzy, 3333 Blue Street, Mytown, SK, S0L 1Z0
...

If you try to Input/Import this data, under the Non-Marc import area will be
greyed out after you browse to find the correct input/import field.

LexWin expects to read such "delimited" data in this form:

"12333", "Smith, Joe", "1111 Green Street", "Mytown", "SK", "S0L 1Z0"
"12334", "Jones, Suzy", "3333 Blue Street", "Mytown", "SK", "S0L 1Z0"
...

Here is a process to convert the data to add the necessary quotation marks.

1. Open the document in WORD
2. Start record 1 line 1 with a " symbol

REPLACE TO INSERT STARTING QUOTE EACH LINE
3. Do CONTROL-H to bring up the replace screen or use EDIT REPLACE
4. Click on Special to get a list of "special characters" that don't show.
5. With cursor in FIND field select Paragraph marker.
6. With cursor in REPLACE field select PARAGRAPH MARKER" (Parage
marker-quote character)
This will show as
FIND ^p
REPLACE WITH ^p" (
7. Click "Replace all"

REPLACE COMMAS WITH ","
8. Perform the following with standard typing characters:
FIND:,
REPLACE WITH:","
9. Get rid of replace screen, and click FILE-SAVE AS
Create a new file name, and save as text
10. Go to LexWin
11. With P for patron database still selected, click on FILE-INPUT IMPORT
12. Browse to find your "modified in word" data file
13. Destination file should be PATRON
14. Select INPUT NON MARC DELIMITED....if this is greyed out something went
wrong in Word export, you are importing the wrong file perhaps, or the end
of line
^P was not replaced with
^P"

15. Click START
Now you see the mapping screen. Our screen is quite simple. You drag the
data name from the left (data source) to the screen on the right (data
destination)

16. Click NEXT to start import.

Process worked fine here.

Jim Bruce
Lex Systems
Product Support