RMS: Creating large item lists

Use of item lists is great both for performance and ease of manipulation of data; except until you have to create them regularly with between 8 and 20 thousand items in the list.  RMS does not appear to provide any method to bulk load a list of items to create an item list.  THe RMS form requires that you type each in one by one - not very efficient and I have no hope of convincing users to do it.  The obvious method of dong this would be to write a program to directly populate SKULIST_HEAD and SKULIST_DETAIL.

Is there a recommended method of creating item lists with large numbers of items?