Export your catalog

From the items list, the toolbar’s button: Download menu produces a downloadable snapshot of the items in scope (the current filter, or everything), as menu item: Excel, menu item: CSV files (.zip) or menu item: MARC. To export only the rows you’ve checked, use the same three entries under button: Download in the selection band.

Formats

• Excel — one workbook named items.xlsx, with a sheet per catalog import template:

  • Books by ISBN, for every copy whose item has an ISBN. It carries the whole record — title, authors, description, cover, topics, page count, copyright year, paperback, the ISBN, your reading-level fields and the copy fields — not just the short list a blank template offers. Multi-value fields like authors and topics are semicolon-joined.
  • Books by title, for books with no ISBN: the same columns without the ISBN and the edition details there is no edition to hold.
  • Non-book items, with the same columns as that import template.

  Every cell is written as text, so a barcode like 0012340 keeps its leading zeros and what you see is what Lyra wrote.

• CSV — items.zip, holding the same three sheets as three CSV files named for them (Books by ISBN.csv and so on), UTF-8 with the same columns. Each one uploads to its slot in the catalog importer. A CSV can’t mark a cell as text, so a spreadsheet application that opens one retypes an all-digit barcode as a number and drops its leading zeros; choose Excel for anything you’ll edit in a spreadsheet, and CSV for another system that reads CSV.

• MARC — a single items.mrc (MARC 21 binary), the format most other systems read. Each copy’s holdings are written into all three conventions Lyra reads back: the Koha 952 — carrying the full copy detail (barcode, call number, location, acquisition date, purchase price, and a not-for-loan marker on reference-only copies) — plus the standard MARC 21 876 (item) and 852 (location). That redundancy keeps the file broadly compatible while letting it re-import into Lyra with every copy field intact.

Re-importing an export

An unfiltered export re-imports into an empty catalog as the catalog it came from. Each sheet is read as its own template — Lyra works that out from the sheet’s own columns — and every column the file fills in is taken as written. The Books by ISBN slot looks an ISBN up only to fill what the file left blank, so an export, which leaves nothing blank, comes back exactly as it left rather than as whatever the ISBN lookup currently says.

Three things no template carries, and so no export does either: an item’s tags, its grade range, and the item policy assigned to it. Set those again after importing, or use MARC, which carries no policy either.

Re-importing an export beside its own copies is a different matter: a barcode is unique across the whole school, so every row comes back as a duplicate-barcode exception. An export is for moving a catalog somewhere that does not already hold it.

See also

• Catalog import — the flip side, and where a re-imported export lands.
• Finding items — the filters that scope an export, and the spreadsheet entry point.
• Migrating catalog data — moving a catalog into Lyra from another system.