Java Programming

Seeing how I probably might have messed up on my first post, I'll try a new post. I am given a text file that contains a chunk of a database (about 29,000) entries. I am supposed to read in the text file and generate a hash of the data, then write out code to write the hash to a binary file. now i instantly assumed it was to be a HashMap, but maybe I am incorrect in this. I am new to java, so assuming something was probably my first mistake. So i'm pretty much stuck, I have a slight grasp on loading a text file, but would i load this text file into an array to hold all the data then try to create a hash of it, then load the hash into the binary file?
The data values for the text file are (ID #, author, title, journal, volume, year, page range, abstract (which in this case is NULL), and keywords) can anybody point in the direction i should be going with this program, there's 2 other portions i have to do for this program, but i figure i better start with this portion of it first, then go from there