newbie Q re bulk pre-register contributors

Hi all

I just designed a blog to go with our small classic car club website here in the south of Spain. Before I make it available to club members I need to do something about registration. I have read up on as much as I can find but couldn’t find an answer to this:

Ideally I would like to be able to pre-register the 60 or so members so that they can post and comment from the outset (some are not very computer literate and registering first might throw them for a loop).

I have looked at the user creation part of Dashboard and it would be very laborious to have to do this for every member. Is there a simple way to create, say, contributor rights for all the members?

I have their names and email addresses – e.g. in an excel file. Is there any way to cut and paste from, or import a pre-defined list?

Thanks for any help…