Data Porting Blues

These days you hardly come across any library which is 100 % manual . Because the PC penetration has increased to such a level that usually you will rarely find a Library without a PC. I do not want to name one Library I know which is without a PC even today but do not worry , you will find more about this library on "Ripley's Believe it or Not" very soon.

Usually many Library automation happen like this ....

Just because you have a PC in the Library and since your friend gives a pirated (usually) Microsoft Office ( or if you are smart , you are using Star Office) - the first step is entering the data about your books in EXCEL ! Normally when you reach around 1000 records , either the worksheet gets corrupted or will not open for some strange reason and then one more word gets added to your vocabulary called "Backup" . Unfortunately Backup is something which you learn only after a crash !

So again it will be the data entry in EXCEL or few lucky ones will get hold of MS ACCESS (or if it was around 10 years back then it would be Foxpro). It is data entry in a flat file with Name , Author , Classification No etc.

Around this time you discover that there are few FREE Library Software's available on the net including the UNESCO packages. So now you are in phase III but soon realize that your data is almost 10000 records are in Access and 3000 in Excel & may be 200 in MS Word !

Incidentally Phase III is usually the most difficult one because in this phase everything works only when the expert is around and when the expert goes away , it is more like an art film by Ritwik Ghatak- till the end you try to figure out who is the real villain and who is the hero.

By this time usually you are convinced that this is the time to go for the commercially available softwares. Suddenly you have some nice interfaces , help , user manuals etc. But now you realize that your data in split into four different formats . Now you have some data in the FREE application which you downloaded and used.

And then starts the never ending exercise called "Data Porting" ! Probably Ekata Kapoor's TV serials are shorter than the Data Porting episodes.

Problem with data porting is - you always realize the mistakes in data porting only after you sign on a document which says that the data was ported properly ! Now, Correcting the data which was wrongly ported , usually causes more harm than any help. So you have "publisher" in place of "pages" and viceversa !

So the moral of the story is ....

1. Always have a long term plan about the automation of your library. Never start just because you have a PC is at your disposal.
2. Try to stick to one format for data storage to the extent possible. Having data in multiple format is a major problem when it comes to data porting.
3. Data porting is a very important exercise and hence plan properly.
4. Check Check & Check again after the data is ported.

And most importantly make sure that the application you use allows you to port the data in a MARC record.

Let me talk about the MARC for few of my further posts !

Barcode Zindabad !

Before I start let me first clarify that I am a big fan of RFID and I really love that technology but because of the kind of incidences I am going to describe now , RFID technology gets a bad name. In fact this is an attempt to learn from the past mistakes ...

Well it was sometime in May , I was in Hyderabad attending the Retail conference. There was a very impressive presentation by ITC about the RFID implementation for their brand "Wills Apparels " . In fact they had some real innovative ideas like an enclosed RFID reader for reading the loads of garments coming in etc. They showed a very impressive film about how they went about selecting a special tag which were UHF type and could read from a long distances .... So in short a very rosy picture of a perfect RFID implementation.

This Sunday as usual my wife saw that magic world in the news paper called "SALE" and that too this time it was 50 % at "Wills Apparels" , as usual there was small catch - only if you buy above Rs. 7000 ! After lot of time at the shop and overcoming our guilt by promising ourselves not to buy anything else in the next month , I came to the cash counter. I was waiting to see an amazing action where in the guy at the counter would pick up all the apparels just cross them on the RFID reader and there we would be ready with our bills ....

But

yes a big BUT , I heard that beep which I was never expecting and red beam of light moving like a chameleon eating an insect. The red beam grabbed the barcode and I had nothing else to say ....
"Barcode Zindabad !" (Long live barcode) .

I tried chatting with those guys at the counter "Kuch problem hai , RFID tag se ? " and the usual story "Woh chalata nahi hai" .

My goodness, the bundles of crores of notes that must have gone down the drain started dancing around me. And believe me I was more dejected than the day I saw our politicians dumping those bundles of notes in the assembly during the "No Confidence Motion" .