Topic: Importing content from PastPerfect
Topic type:
The process for importing images into Kete from Past Perfect museum software.
Intro
The historical societies of Horowhena use Past Perfect as a collection management system for their physical collections of images, objects, archives and library books. Past Perfect allows each record to have digital images. We wanted to share the digital images of the historical societies online through Kete. This process details how to go about getting the data and image files out of our local Past Perfect and into Kete Horowhenua. You will need to tweak this accordingly for your own site!
1. Create a folder.
Create a folder somewhere, desktop or somewhere else where you can find it, with a name containing no spaces - but dashes and underscores are ok. In Horowhenua we group our digital images into folders containing 1000 image files, and when each folder is 'full' we import its contents into Kete. The folders are stored and numbered as so: in pp4/images/001, pp4/images/002, pp4/images/005 etc
We are now up to folder 12 in PP we will name this new folder: < images-012> . Then make a subfolder called images.
2. Export data from Past Perfect
Open Past Perfect and go to Utilities | Export. You will need to do separate exports for photos, objects and accessions.
a. Photos.
Select [ all fields], [selected records] then type in the filter statement: <imagefile="012" then selct output format as [xml] then save it to the folder you created earlier with the name "records.xml".
For example the path might be: C:\Documents and settings\ images-012\records.xml
b. Accessions.
Exactly as above but the search filter should be entered as: <accessno.descrip> and save it as accessions.xml
eg: C:\Documents and settings\ images-012\accessions.xml
The file names and case are really important!
3. Images.
Now that you have the photos and accessions data you need the actual images themselves.
Navigate to the correct images file eg. "M:/data/pp4/images/012" and select all the image files from within that folder and copy them into the subfolder you made earlier ie C:\Documents and settings\ images-012\images\
4. Importing into Kete
You will now have a folder called "photos-012" containing 2 files: 'accessions.xml' and 'records.xml' and a folder called 'images' containing a whole bunch of jpegs or whatever your images are.
Now I need Walter to take over writing the instructions :)
