Importing Patron or Student Records
Note: School libraries, If you are importing student records for your new school year.
Have you deleted/purge the student records from the last grade previous school year? If not, delete or purge the students who are no longer in the school before importing the incoming student information. Here is how (link)
To import patrons or students it is better to first create an Excel file to have a better look at the information being imported into Mandarin. The minimum information recommended would be a unique identifier for each patron barcode or student ID (from your SIS), last name and first name.
Additional fields for schools: grade, homeroom, teacher, Email, etc.
Additional fields for academic/public: address, phone number, cell, Email, etc.
Create a different spreadsheet if necessary for each group of patrons you are importing. For instance, for new staff or teacher members because you can only choose one group when you do an import.
Once you create an Excel file we can help you import it, email it to us and provide as much detail about the data in the email. We'll go ahead and import it for you.
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*** Important notes ***
Mandarin will never remove any students automatically from your database, librarians have to inspect and remove them either manually or through a global change
When uploading or importing the student information into your library catalog, If the existing patron records in Mandarin have the same ID/barcode as those on the file being imported, the system will do a match and simply update the record with any new information, like grade or teacher information and It will add the new patrons to the database if the student ID or barcode is not found.
Here is the import process steps:
We will open the Excel file and make sure the information lines up in every column with the information the library needs. After this, the file will be saved as "tab delimited".
In the “catalog” button, click on the drop-down arrow and select "Cataloging Tools". On the column to the left, select "import"
From “select table”, choose “patrons”, then click the blue folder and navigate to the patron file location. Next, select “upload”.
Click “import” on the right. At step 1 of 4, click “next”. On step 2 of 4, the patrons on the file will be listed. Click “next”.
MAPPING: At step 3 of 4 a check mark will be placed next to the fields to be imported. Select the fields where import each row as shown below.
At step 4 of 4, click the down arrow for the patron group where these will be imported (a group assignment rule can be applied as well). Finally click “finish” to import the patrons.