May 2002 - Koha - lists.katipo.co.nz

Questions about using Koha in our primary school
by georgejenner＠belgacom.net 15 Jul '02

15 Jul '02

Hello there I'm going to start with one long message. I've been through the archives and need to talk to you all. My child's primary school has been split into two campuses, and we've lost the library entirely. And there is no budget for a new library for several years. Open source and freeware look even better when you have no money :-) So some parents have volunteered to make a library. A computer has been donated, and the collection will be started from donated books. The committee have also received good advice from another local school : be very wary of parents offering help with computers. That's me :-) The main question is one you must receive frequently. Does platform independence really include Windows? The computer has been purchased and I assume it came with Win XP (I haven't seen it yet). I don't think I could convince them to use Linux, even if I had a clue about it myself. In any case, I want to test out and demonstrate Koha using my laptop which runs Win ME. I see from the installation notes that it has been installed on NT and Win 2000 with considerable difficulty. Can you tell me how difficult? I have no knowledge of perl or Apache. Does that make it pointless trying without years of study? The next question is about languages. The OPAC at our school would be presented in at least 5 European languages, including Greek. The school has 5 language sections, plus Irish, but all other languages in the European Union would be represented in the book collection. So would a multilingual OPAC be difficult to produce? There would possibly be some benefit to Koha from this, and perhaps this could be our contribution to the cause: translations of key documents into all these languages. Next question. The library will be staffed by volunteer parents with less computer knowledge than even me. There won't be a trained librarian for at least 3 years. Would this present a problem? Is the system sufficiently simple and robust that we can't get into much trouble? Next question. As the collection will be started with donated books, we need to catalog them. There is a shareware proggy that purports to take an ISBN and then search the internet for the book, then places the biblio dat in a database. It's called Readerware. It says it even gets the cover art and includes that. I think that having cover art would be really nifty for a primary school library. So could the OPAC show that. Is this simply a question of having an image in a field of a MySQL database. And is that possible? I'll stop there. If you can give me good news I'll start downloading. I've got a couple of months to get it going as the school year starts in September in Europe. As if things weren't weird enough. Thanks for any help George

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Acceptance Letter
by Pat Eyler 31 May '02

31 May '02

31 May, 2002 To the Koha community; I'd like to take a moment to accept the role of Kaitiaki[1] of Koha, to thank those who have done so much work already, and to give an overview of where I think we need to be going as a community. Let me start with a bit of background: for the last month or so, there has been an ongoing discussion between the developers about the desirability of an official management/leadership function for the Koha project. The good folks at Katipo have been doing an admirable job in this area, and are voluntarily opening this process up to the larger community. The result of these discussions was a decision to elect a person to oversee the project. This person's role is to work with the other developers and the users of Koha to guide its development into a library system that can serve the needs of any library; large or small, english speaking or not. The Kaitiaki will help craft a strategy for growth and development, encourage organizations to use Koha, improve support for Koha, and recruit additional developers for the project. In our last meeting, 30 May 2002, the developers present decided to name me, Pat Eyler, as the Kaitiaki. I'm honored and humbled by this decision. I'd like to pledge to all of you, users and developers, that I'll do my best to make Koha as successful, as complete, as user-friendly, and as capable as it can possibly be. Koha would not exist if not for the efforts of the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT) and Katipo. I'll mention only three people by name, not because they are the only ones to have worked on it, but because I'm afraid I'd leave people out if I tried to mention everyone. Rosalie Blake (Head of Libraries for HLT), Rachel Hamilton-Williams (General Manager at Katipo), and Chris Cormack (Programmer at Katipo) should be well recognized for their courage and efforts. I hope that we'll be working together for a long time to come. Since Koha's initial release to the world outside Katipo and HLT, many others have contributed to the project. I'd like to thank all of them for their efforts, and encourage them to keep up their good work. I'll close with a quick overview of my hopes for Koha in the coming year or so. In the near term, we'll be releasing Koha 1.2.0 featuring a number of bug fixes and improvements. We'll likely release a few more 1.2 series releases as well featuring yet more improvements and bug fixes. Sometime in the late summer or early fall, we'll begin releasing the 1.4 series. This release series will feature MARC capabilities as well as continuing improvements. In parallel to these efforts, we'll be trying to internationalize Koha. Our first targets will be Polish (updating an earlier translation) and Spanish (a brand new translation). The experience we gain from these two efforts should help us make additional translations much easier. We're also going to work hard to raise community awareness of Koha in both the Open Source/Free Software and the professional library communities. This work will involve announcements, appearances at conferences, and more work on documentation. If you'd like to participate in any of these efforts, or if you would like to suggest additional projects for us to take on, please feel free to email me at <pate(a)gnu.org>. thanks, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project [1] Kaitiaki, pronounced kah-ee-tee-ah-kee (unless my Maori pronunciation is badly off), means guardian.

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May 30th irc meeting
by Pat Eyler 31 May '02

31 May '02

Just a quick note to let everyone know that meeting notes from the May 30th meeting are posted at: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=IrcMeetingNotes a full log is at: http://www.haz.cmsd.bc.ca/cgi-bin/kohalog.pl?date=30May02&refresh=&firstlin… Thanks, -pate

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Help ! Acqui.simple needed
by Olugbenga Adara 25 May '02

25 May '02

Hi everybody, Please i want to use acqui.simple but do not know how to get it on cvs. could someone please send the files to me or explain how i can get the files from cvs. please note i use a cybercafe so have IE for access only thanks Olugbenga SAdara __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com

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Agenda Update
by Tonnesen Steve 23 May '02

23 May '02

Items for IRC Meeting May 30, 2002 10PM GMT irc.katipo.co.nz #koha =============== Community =============== 1. Benevolent Dictator election status (Nick?) We've got nominations, what's the next step? Who's going to make it happen? 2. koha advocacy (Pat?) What efforts are currently going on? How are they going? What else should we be doing? =============== Development =============== 3. progress toward 1.2 (Chris?) What's the current status? What obstacles do we face? 4. tentative targets for 1.2 (Chris?) What are our milestones on the march to 1.2? 5. 1.3 issues (Paul?) What issues are we facing in 1.3 development land? 6. HTML::Template (Steve?/Chris?) What is the current status of templating? What needs to happen next? 7. MARCification (Paul/Steve) What is the current status of MARC? What needs to happen next? 8. Bugzilla (Steve) Can we use Katipo's bugzilla for centralized bug reporting? 9. Unit Testing (Pat?) What is this? How can it help koha? Do we want to do it? =============== Docs =============== 10. Install Guide (Nick?) Current Status? What's next? What help is needed? 11. User's Guide (Rosalie?) Current Status? What's next? What help is needed? 12. Admin's Guide (Pat?) What is this? What's next? Do we want to do this? 13. Developer's Handbook (Pat?) What is this? What's next? Do we want to do this? 14. DocBook Tutorial & Templates (Pat?) What is this? What's next? Do we want to do this?

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feature idea
by Emile Snyder 22 May '02

22 May '02

Hi all, The desire for a new feature struck me while using my local library catalog system recently, and I thought I would toss it out on the list. Don't know if anyone else will find it attractive... I live in a fairly rural location and while the library system is fairly large the number of volumes at the local branch is relatively small. So I place lots of holds on books which I can then pick up later. I have found that the way I most often select books these days is to have the telnet interface to my library catalog open next to a browser window, and explore various reviews at amazon, then see if the library system has a book and place a hold on it if possible. The problem is I usually find many more books that look really interesting than I can possibly read in the month or so that a checkout covers ;) So the feature I wish I had is an "interest list" that the catalog could keep for me. It kind of sounds like feature bloat on the one hand... why don't I just keep a notepad handy? But never the less, I keep wishing it was there. thanks, -emile

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IRC meeting and IRC logs
by Tonnesen Steve 22 May '02

22 May '02

Just a reminder of a Koha IRC meeting: When: May 30 10PM GMT Where: irc.katipo.co.nz:6667 #koha Topics: To Be Announced Also, there is a log of IRC traffic available now at: http://www.haz.cmsd.bc.ca/cgi-bin/kohalog.pl You can set your timezone and record important discussions so that others can find them easily. Steve Tonnesen

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Global symbol "%env" requires explicit package name
by Mitch Keller 22 May '02

22 May '02

Hello, I'm unable to add new members because I get this error in my apache log: Global symbol "%env" requires explicit package name at /var/www/koha/cgi-bin/koha/moremember.pl line 231. Execution of /var/www/koha/cgi-bin/koha/moremember.pl aborted due to compilation errors. [Tue May 21 22:48:00 2002] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] Premature end of script headers: /var/www/koha/cgi-bin/koha/moremember.pl I'm using the latest CVS version of Koha. Can anybody explain what's wrong? Thanks, Mitch

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Install Steps for RedHat 7.x
by Olugbenga Adara 18 May '02

18 May '02

Hello all, Please can someone help me out with a step by step guide on how to install koha on RedHAt 7.1. The install file that came with the Koha distibution leaves me confused. For instance i could not get apache to run the perl files as it says the document is not found. I have successfully setup the database in mysql and imported the koha.mysql into it. However I run into problems when setting up apache. Also i discover that there is no where in the install file which states where one should copy the other perl files in the scripts directory. For information, i am trying to evaluate koha before recommending it to a university here in nigeria. thanks. Olugbenga Adara __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com

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Re: [Koha] schema question
by Alan Millar 15 May '02

15 May '02

> I've got a couple of quick questions about the Koha database schema. > (2) I don't understand the distinction between items and biblioitems As I understand it, biblio, biblioitems, and items are sort of a three-tier hierarchy. Say, just for example, you have 8 copies of "Hamlet". One is hard cover published in, say, 1955; three are identical hard cover copies published in 1995; and four are identical paperbacks published in 2002. You'd have one entry in biblio for "Hamlet". You'd have three entries in biblioitems, one for each distinct edition/publication. You'd have 8 entries in items, one for each distinct physical book. (I think the "items" table should have been named "itemcopies", but that's just my opinion.) > (3) How to I differentiate between children's and adult's books, between fiction and non-fiction? Specifically, how to represent it in the database? (Disclaimer: I'm a computer guy, not a librarian.) As far as I see, the primary fields we have to work with are the Dewey number and the item type. In reviewing the list archives, it seems the item type indicates a collection more than an object description, so children's vs adult's makes sense for it. It seems common to me for libraries to have a "paperback" collection separate from the main stacks, but also to have plenty of books in the main stacks with paperback bindings. I'd like something to store the binding separately from the collection, but it looks like item type is the only thing at the moment. Any suggestions? (There is a "binding" field in the items table, which is a number, and I can't find it used anywhere. Anyone know what it is supposed to be for?) Fiction is an interesting one. Take a cartoon book like "Calvin and Hobbes". At one library near me it is in the fiction section with no Dewey number, at another one it is in the non-fiction section under 741.5. The Library of Congress lists it as 741.5, but I sure would consider it fiction. Is this a common problem? - Alan

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