http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6491-7203
Technology has a finite life, and with upgrades to systems comes the need for data to be migrated from one system to another. Migrating Library Data: A Practical Manual would be the ideal support for library staff new to such a project, or for those people who have experience and need a checklist.
The editors, Kyle Banerjee and Bonnie Parks have extensive library experience in systems and metadata management. Kyle has authored works on digital libraries and digital repository management and Bonnie has contributed chapters in cataloguing books and was the recipient of Ulrich’s Serial Librarianship award in 2016. The chapter authors hail from universities in the United States, and have drawn upon their experience with metadata, digital library management, library systems and their own data migration experiences to provide practical steps to the process.
The content is very pertinent to library systems, but is written in a way that staff who have not been part of a data migration can follow and understand. The chapters provide an insight to the overall process and guidance in how to work with formats and data cleaning. There is also a chapter devoted to using MarcEdit. The chapter ‘Thinking beyond excel’, encourages library staff to work with OpenRefine, rather than spreadsheets, to clean up data. This chapter comes with tutorials and cheat sheets to provide additional assistance.
There are tables and images used throughout the book, particularly in the chapter devoted to MarcEdit. These are unlikely to date, and are used within the context of the instruction.
There are sections for particular types of library data, including bibliographic, acquisitions, patron data, serials, electronic resources and repository data. The book also discusses the challenges of working in a shared system and working with system vendors.
This book points to the need for librarians to equip themselves with the necessary skills to manipulate data and data mining, and becoming familiar with tools such as OpenRefine and XML. It also showcases the need for librarians to draw upon their own experience in project management and relationship management to achieve a successful result. Ultimately this manual is not just about migrating data, but is about how to extract and modify the data to achieve the best results in a new system.
Having recently completed a data migration, I can relate to the planning, the data cleaning, and became very familiar with MarcEdit. Having this book available now for the next data migration will make the process less challenging.
Library Manager Research Services, Australian Catholic University
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6491-7203
© 2018 Stephanie McGlinchey
https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2018.1429829