diff --git a/GETTING_STARTED.md b/GETTING_STARTED.md
index 7ebcd1c..d223196 100644
--- a/GETTING_STARTED.md
+++ b/GETTING_STARTED.md
@@ -51,7 +51,41 @@ cpan Date::Calc
 cpan Tie::DBI
 ```
 
+# Create the HPR database
+
+The hpr_generator relies on information from a database to generate many of the 
+files for the website (for example: index.html, series/index.html, 
+hpr_mp3.rss, etc). This data is available from a MySQL dump file found on 
+hackerpublicradio.org at "https://www.hackerpublicradio.org/hpr.sql".
+
+The first step is to download the hpr.sql file. This can be done using your 
+browser, or by running one of the following commands:
+
+`curl https://www.hackerpublicradio.org/hpr.sql --output ./hpr.sql`
+
+or
+
+`wget --directory-prefix=./ https://www.hackerpublicradio.org/hpr.sql`
+
+## Creating an SQLite database file
+
+The SQL of the hpr.sql file must be converted from MySQL specific statements to 
+SQLite specific statements. The mysql2sqlite script found in the utils directory 
+is used for this conversion. First remove the lines from hpr.sql that 
+mysql2sqlite can't handle:
+
+`sed '/^DELIMITER ;;/,/^DELIMITER ;/d' < ./hpr.sql > ./hpr-sqlite.sql`
+
+Next run the mysql2sqlite script piping its output into the sqlite3 
+program which creates the hpr.db file:
+
+`./utils/mysql2sqlite ./hpr-sqlite.sql | sqlite3 ./hpr.db`
+
+For convenience, the update-sqlite-db.sh script in the utils directory
+automates the above steps (including downloading the hpr.sql file). 
+From the root of the local hpr_generator repository run:
+
+`./utils/update-sqlite-db.sh`
 
-# Configure site-generator
 
 # Run site-generator
\ No newline at end of file