brad> Our school uses commercial library automation software. We would brad> like to convert the database to open source. Anyone have brad> experience doing so? My wife works at a library which has been working on switching from one DB and vendor to another for their data. It's not easy in general, though if you can get the old DB to export data in a known and stardard format (such as MARC, see another reply to this thread for details) then you're closer. You should also take a look at the Koha open source library software. It includes all the various modules you need to run a library. http://www.koha.org Also, it's not clear what you're really trying to do here. Are you trying to move from Oracle to MySQL (for example), while keeping the same commercial library automation software? Or are you looking to replace the entire software stack you're using? John John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies stoffel@lucent.com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-952-7548