Export to marc21

[Gliderengineering]

We need to export library book records from fmp8.5 to MARC 21 database format. Can this be done? There are about 15000 records and about 15 fields in each.

Any help or experience would assist.

[Wim Decorte]

Sure it can be done.  How depends on the structure of your tables, and it will be a fair amount of scripting to get it done.  

[comment]

I've taken a very brief look at the MARC 21 format. IMHO, your best bet would be to export in one of the plain text formats - CSV, tab-delimited or XML - then look for a tool to convert the result to MARC 21. This is assuming you are speaking of a one-time data migration, not a process that needs be repeated periodically. Otherwise it may get a bit complicated, esp. because the MARC 21 documentation is not so easy to comprehend (again, IMHO). Once you know exactly what the result should look like, you could use export as XML with a custom XSLT stylesheet to generate it.

[Gliderengineering]

Thanks for the help. I have found a program to accomplish this without too much programming. The records end up in Kohu, which is a Linux based library program.