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Import Items
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While it is possible to manually enter item records, there is an easier way! Use Alexandria's item imports to quickly add your catalog's records.
Most book vendors provide title information for the items they sell in industry-standard MARC/MicroLIF records. These records usually accompany your order in an email attachment or on a CD-ROM. Conveniently, Alexandria can read MARC or MicroLIF records directly, saving you the hassle of typing item information directly into the computer. Also, if you move library books from one collection to another, you can provide associated title records that the new location can import into its Alexandria database.
For item imports, Alexandria accepts MARC, MicroLIF, and other tab-delimited formats, including .txt, .tab, .tsv, .mrc, .mlif, .001, and .dat.
If you are automating a new library, ask your book vendor for MARC or MicroLIF records when you order new items.
If you are automating an existing library with catalog information (usually catalog cards), consider using our retrospective conversion service to make the information machine-readable. We will create MicroLIF and MARC records for all items in your collection and give you an import file afterwards. This is a good time to examine your collection and remove unused and outdated items.
Alexandria performs an analysis on each and every MARC record imported so that information is correctly imported from a wide number of vendors. If you find records that don't import correctly, send them to COMPanion and we'll fine-tune Alexandria import them properly.
Supported Sources
Alexandria correctly imports records from the following sources:
- 1987 MicroLIF
- 1991 MicroLIF
- US MARC Communication & MARC 21
- SunLink, WisCAT
- Laser Cat
- Dynix, Follett
- Canadian MARC
- ...and many more.
