The BISON Import Items facility is designed to import items from formatted CSV and TSV text files, plain-text reports, Excel spreadsheets and bibliographic MARC files.

As the processing of the import file must take place on the server, the first stage of importing items is to import the source file into the Mystic file space allocated to your account. These files can be viewed and managed manually through the File Manager, but it is advised (and is far easier and straightforward) to utilise the facilities provided here.

Select the [Add] toolbar icon to start the file uploader. Select and upload the file. When the file is stored in the Mystic file space, it will be prefixed by a date stamp in order to uniquely identify the file to users as having been imported on this date.

Before the import can take place, Mystic must pre-process the file in order to understand what data is available. Once the file is imported, select the [Load All] toolbar icon to start the pre-processing by displaying the appropriate processing dialog. You may therefore be presented with either:

• For CSV (comma-separated values), TSV (tab-separated values) and other files with a known field and record separator, the BISON Text Importer is presented.

• For Excel spreadsheets, the BISON Text Importer is presented, pre-configured with a knowledge of rows and columns for automatic loading of the data.

• For MARC based text files, the BISON MARC Importer is presented.

In most cases, the import pre-process will perform the task of loading the data into the application as well as writing the individual records to the live Catalogue.

In the rare cases where the pre-processing importer does not automatically write the items into the live Catalogue, the items are displayed in the list box within the BISON Import Items dialog.

To start the process of importing these new items, click the [Create] toolbar icon.

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