Import from personal to organization

I created a personal library and now want to import those items into a newly created organizational library. Is there a way to import en masse without scanning all the books over?

Technically, yes. There is a way to export the list of books from one account you own, and import that list into another account you own. However, the export doesn't export everything (and is a bit temperamental), and the import is limited and subject to strict conditions: you can only import certain fields, the order of the fields is fixed, and you cannot miss out any field.

Your best process is to do the export, pop it into Excel (or a similar spreadsheet) and paste the columns from that export into the import template, and then import that file. You will need to clean up the Excel before copying columns across (especially watch out non-UTF8 characters in descriptions as they potentially break the export by breaking rows). You can try running the export through a UTF-8 conversion tool before opening it in Excel.

Once you've imported your cleaned up data into the new account, you then need to check your records. Open each book in turn in both accounts, and copy any missing data from the old account and paste it into the new account.

The success of this depends on how good your underlying data is, so clean up the data in the old account as best you can, do the export, check and clean the export in Excel, paste appropriate columns into the template, then check the uploaded data.

I've done the export step from my account, but I've never tried importing (I probably should have for my recent cataloguing binge - loads of public domain ebooks books that needed logging properly as separate editions).

Do you want the books in both accounts or do you want to move them? It would be a lot easier to change your first account's name and make it organizational.

If you have ISBNs in the imported data doesn't it replace some of your fields with data from the source?

>4 jjwilson61:
Yes, if the importing tool detects isbns in your csv file, it will ignore all the other columns (title, author, etc) and fetch those data together with the isbns. The obvious workaround is to leave the isbn column fields blank (apart from the title row, obvs).

If you want complete data with the correct isbns, you have to choose between importing isbns and correcting/adjusting the non-isbn data, or preserving your data and copy/pasting the isbns from one record to the other.

I think the suggestion in >3 MarthaJeanne: is a very sensible one.

>3 MarthaJeanne: How do you change a personal account to an organizational account with the ability to check out? Because this sounds simplest and is something I am looking to do myself as I am donating my personal library to become my church library.

The ability to check out is in every account. https://vimeo.com/120180012 is a video made about it when it was first presented.

You can change the account settings in account settings from your profile.