I will be completing a long term archiving project (more than 5 years of part-time work) at the end of June and wanted to reach out for advice. I am a beginning archivist (currently in the MLIS program at San Jose State) and well-versed in filemaker pro but not so much in migrating data. I've been working independently from afar (I've been archiving in California and the client is in Texas). The Marketing Communications department I'm working with doesn't know much of anything about archiving and databases and metadata so it's up to me to be the expert when I come into town for a week to migrate the data on site.

The Filemaker database consists of roughly 12,000 records linked to digitized tif image files. The client has a copy of all TIFs to date (some remaining to be completed and will be sent ahead) and has them stored on their server. I've done some test runs on exporting from filemaker to excel (works fine) but not any tests (except initially about 5 years ago) on importing into Portfolio. I've read extensively (online forums) about how to do it and it will apparently be straight-forward. But I'm wondering if anyone has done this before and if so, are there pitfalls to look out for? Is it recommended that I download a trial version of Portfolio and check the importing for possible snafus? It's likely that the version I can get for free won't match what the client has, and since they are in Texas it's not so easy to get access to their software even temporarily. I also have some basic questions about who and how to direct before I get there so I can hit the ground running. Should I consider advising the department to simply purchase Filemaker Pro and keep the archival database (up to late 1980s) as a separate entity from their Extensis Portfolio database (late 1980s to present)? Or should I be teaching myself how to use Portfolio in preparation of this migration? So many questions...