Refactoring a library’s legacy catalog: a case study | Joachim Ganseman | 2015

"Abstract—It is generally deemed safe practice to not change a working IT system, but at some point, driven by new advances in computing, an upgrade cannot be avoided anymore. This paper tells the story of a custom configured, pre-MARC catalog from the early 1990s. Well-tailored to the needs of a music library, it proved solid and had been in use without changes ever since, amassing almost 60,000 manually entered records by the end of 2014. With full MS-DOS support disappearing from recent OSes, it urgently needed to be ported to a modern web-accessible OPAC. This confronted us with several challenges: finding a robust way to convert records without losing information, dealing with corrupt or erroneous data entered in several languages, deciding on the functionality of a new catalog and lending library management system, etc. All while not losing sight of the road ahead: eventually, we want to be able to link the catalog to sizeable repositories of digitized scores and audio recordings that have been collected internally over the years, such that it could grow out to effectively fulfill a bridge function between scores and performances. The database conversion process is presented here, paying special attention to the specific requirements of a music research library and correction of encountered errors. This is a useful case study for anyone who ever needs to reintegrate a legacy digital catalog into a modern library system."

"...we decided to explore the migration to a web-based alternative first, and picked the open source Koha project as initial migration target, mostly because of its very complete suite of functionality...."