- Koha - lists.katipo.co.nz

Koha details/features
by Randy Edwards 06 Sep '00

06 Sep '00

Hi Folks, I just ran across KOHA and am quite excited. I've always felt that library automation software was ridiculously expensive and would be an ideal candidate for a copyleft project -- kudos to those of you that have tackled this! Perusing the web site I find myself full of questions as to the exact capabilities and features of KOHA. For example, does it handle distribution; bar coding, scanning and things like that? What are its exact functions and capabilities? To give you an idea of the angle I'm coming from, I'm the technology coordinator for a public school district here in New Hampshire in the U.S.. I'd love to get some software to replace the ancient card catalogs that our students are using. Of course, the librarians of our two schools would love to be able to bar scan books to check them out, to generate reports of whose book is late, and to merge the catalogs of our two schools. Any whacks with a clue-bat, pointers, descriptions of capabilities, and other info for a KOHA newbie would be greatly appreciated -- TIA. Regards, . Randy

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Re: [Koha] Introduction
by Chris Cormack 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

Hi Mark, > > Bluntly, the CDK based issues system isn't reliable. It crashes every so > > often (sometimes 2-3 times in quick succession, sometimes only once or twice > > a day). We haven't been able to track it down directly, since it seems to > > be a difficult-to-emulate combination of CDK, server load, and possibly > > giffy data coming out of the database. The slang module supports colour, > > and will provide us with more data points for the unreliability, whether it > > is more stable or not. > > > I've certainly experience some of the Perl wrappers segfaulting on me > (the RRDtool wrappers spring to my mind) when you feed them crap. > > Are you also using the SLang Toolkit by Joey Hess (Term::Stool)? > When do you think you'll have your returns/issue converted over to slang > and have made another release/set up anon CVS? Yep, thats indeed what we are using. It has been pretty much all converted over it just needs some serious testing. The conversion only affects a small number of modules namely all those in Circulation/ and Circulation.pm itself. The rest of the modules have been untouched. Work had stalled for a little while, as I was away all last week, but I should be able to work some more on it this week. Im not entirely sure what I will do with Slang modified modules ... whether I fork the cvs tree, or give them new names and add them. I could tar them up and pop them on www.koha.org for download I guess, until they have been tested. Then if its all good they can replace the CDK based modules. > > My next major conumdrum is where to start working on Koha, any suggestions? > I know Benedict from poland is very keen to work on localising koha. He has offered to write some locale files in polish. So that koha can be modified to uses locales::gettext. He's not a programmer tho, so he will need help on editing the perl scripts to use gettext. Hmmm, there are also some bugs/glitches in acquisitions. One of the biggest being, the librarians often want to order some books with the same title but in a different format. Eg A video, a talking book and a paperback copy of the same title. The also might want each one of these to come out of a seperate bookfund. At the moment there is no easy way to do this, and they would have to place 3 separate orders. Another section that needs work is what im calling a catalog maintenance section. So, somewhere you can go to edit/delete subject headings in the subject authority file. Or edit the other authority files. Were you could tidy up mistakes easily, like merge two identical biblios. And anything else the librarians need :-) This may well fit into your goals below. > In terms of my goals for producing a library system that UniSFA can use > it would be working on a catalouging application in terms of their > requirements: ie as quick and painless for the (volunteer) librarian to > use. > > ziggy's catalog application - (this may not be 100% accurate, I coded this > up over 12 months ago) > - ran in a telnet window > - code worked and proceeded as follows: > 1. User scanned in EAN barcode from back of book or alternatively typed > in ISBN number (or just skipped this step) > If ISBN number was already in the database, copy details and goto step 4. > 2. A listbox with a list of Publishers was displayed with > publishers who shared the same publisher code as decoded from the ISBN > listed first. Alternatively, the user could enter a new publisher > into the database. > 3. A listbox with a list of Authors (with authors who share the publisher > listed first) Alternatively, the user could enter a new author > into the database. > 4. A screen to enter the rest of the books details in (including barcode) > > Of course, I think a real librarian (tm) would run cringing from this, but > UniSFA is almost exclusively devoted to one genre and these optomisations > would save a lot of time. (especially since we tend to catalog a lot > of books at once rather than spread over time) > > > Where should I start? Or should I work seperately and make some effort > to merge my changes back at a later date? > If any of the areas I mentioned seem like a good place to start, let me know and we can work out a good way to go about it. There are also lots of other things to work on. So let me know what you think. Chris -- Chris Cormack Katipo Communications Programmer/Sys Admin chris(a)katipo.co.nz 025 500 789 www.katipo.co.nz ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Chris Cormack Katipo Communications Programmer/Sys Admin chris(a)katipo.co.nz 025 500 789 www.katipo.co.nz

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Fwd: Re: [Koha] Contributions/Alliances
by Simon Blake 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

Hi Michael On Fri, Sep 01, 2000 at 12:38:56AM -0400, Michael S. Williams said: > > Hello all, > > As a small school district in the US we are very interested and > excited about the work you have done and are doing. Our Media > Specialists have proposed contracting out the modifications to the > software that they would like to have. (ie Barcodes/Readers, Data > conversion, MARC records) . We are in the process of deciding to either > upgrade our current software (Follett's Unison) or purchase another so > the timing is pretty good. Anyone interested? Koha does barcodes, in the sense that keyboard wedge barcode scanners work a treat. We haven't needed to write any support for other input devices, but we'll cheerfully incorporate code from anybody who does. > Also, have you considered putting this project up on Sourceforge ? Not to any particular depth. New Zealand is (quite literally) at the ends of the earth, and Internet links out of here are slow and expensive (at least in comparison to the mainland US). So we'd be less keen on moving our CVS tree out of town, since it would probably mean slower access for our programmers. Having said that, sourceforge has lots of neat resources, and it would mean that we could cut down on our data transfer costs if the Koha site gets busy. So we may well look at using sourceforge in the future. Cheers Si -- Simon Blake simon(a)katipo.co.nz Katipo Communications +64 25 300 825 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Simon Blake simon(a)katipo.co.nz Katipo Communications +64 25 300 825

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Contributions/Alliances
by Michael S. Williams 01 Sep '00

01 Sep '00

Hello all, As a small school district in the US we are very interested and excited about the work you have done and are doing. Our Media Specialists have proposed contracting out the modifications to the software that they would like to have. (ie Barcodes/Readers, Data conversion, MARC records) . We are in the process of deciding to either upgrade our current software (Follett's Unison) or purchase another so the timing is pretty good. Anyone interested? Also, have you considered putting this project up on Sourceforge ? Michael Williams Haywood County Schools http://www.k12linux.org

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Re: [Koha] Introduction (fwd)
by Rachel Hamilton-Williams 31 Aug '00

31 Aug '00

Cheers John, Our hope is that another library who are more standards focused, and use MARC and Z3950 will pick those up as their contribution to the project - either getting us to write it, or having their own people do it. Those things weren't *most* important to Horowhenua Library, so they aren't in these first releases. We at Katipo are always going to be most focused on those libraries that have commissioned changes and new modules, but we will gladly undertake new commisions, and help/colaborate with other projects. There are other MARC projects and I think Z3950 project in the open source library community, and hooking in with them would be fantastic from our point of view. Seriously we are unlikely to take over the world - certainly the american market is pretty daunting, but there are lots of other libraries just like ours we're sure who have to pay for MARC and end up throwing most of it away anyway, who have time but not $$, or who want more control over their own destiny. > i hope too that koha takes over the world. but it's ultimately going to > come down to two factors in my mind: stability and standards. We are very conscious of stability - and running over crappy lines on crappy gear is one of the situations we've engineered for. We are rewriting modules that have been giving us trouble, and fully expect to continue to refine the system. We have an expectation of no unplanned server downtime other than from gear failure, no more than "normal" browser flakeyness, and no core dumps on the telnet circ module Standards - well we are lead by our librarians - personnally I wouldn't know a library standard if it hit me on the head, they tell me how the library runs, and we make a system that facilitates that. Cheers Rachel _____________________________________________________________ Rachel Hamilton-Williams Katipo Communications WEBMISTRESS ph 025 300 825 or +64 04 389 1285 mailto:rachel@katipo.co.nz PO Box 7039, Wellington http://www.katipo.co.nz New Zealand

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Introduction
by Mark Tearle 30 Aug '00

30 Aug '00

Hi Quick Introduction, my name is Mark Tearle and I've been working on creating a library system to replace an aging hypercard stack that the University Science Fiction Association [1] at The University of Western Australia uses to keep track of it's library. I got some distance last year in producing a system that had the same basic design as Koha but that project failed due to changing python libraries and lack of time. I'd like to contribute to a Koha as it has firstly shipped and shows a bit more promise than my efforts. Yours Mark [1] http://www.unisfa.gu.uwa.edu.au/ -- Mark Tearle - mark(a)tearle.com Stone: Let's stick to established procedures. -- The Andromeda Leavitt: Establishment gonna fall down and go boom. Strain (1971)

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Re: [Koha] (Fwd) download of koha
by Ron Wickersham 28 Aug '00

28 Aug '00

hi john, if you go to the page with downloads: http://www.koha.org/download (no "s" on the end) you can read the text pages by clicking on them. the tarred files can be downloaded (in Netscape) by placing the cursor over the link, and clicking with the right button and selecting "Save line as" which will bring up a dialog box letting you specify where the compressed tar file should be placed. -ron On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Rosalie Blake wrote: > Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 09:01:10 +1200 > From: Rosalie Blake <rosalie(a)levin.library.org.nz> > To: koha(a)lists.katipo.co.nz > Subject: [Koha] (Fwd) download of koha > > > ------- Forwarded message follows ------- > Date sent: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 12:23:13 -0600 > From: john <john(a)colosys.net> > To: rosalie(a)library.org.nz > Subject: download of koha > > hey what you guys are doing is neat. we've been doing some work with > waikato on indexing of newspapers using greenstone--you can look at > what we're attempting at www.colosys.net/pathfinder and click on the > newspaper digitization link. > > discoverd koha today. tried to download but it didn't seem to retreive > a file--just saw the binaries. any help? > > first the america's cup, now two great open source library > projects--must be something in the new zealand air. > > cheers. > > john campbell > director > pathfinder library system > grand junction, colorado > john(a)colosys.net > > ------- End of forwarded message ------- > > _______________________________________________ > Koha mailing list > Koha(a)lists.katipo.co.nz > http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha >

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Ziggy release
by Mark Tearle 28 Aug '00

28 Aug '00

Hi all The following URL is a release of my failed attempt at creating a library system for UniSFA: http://phregia.ucs.uwa.edu.au/~mtearle/ziggy-r1.tar.gz Why am I releasing it? There are a few tidbits in that I want to include into Koha, there's somestuff in there that is useful as a comparison, etc. Of note: 1) some spec documents for the project 2) a port of Business::ISBN to python 3) a Cdk like curses library for Python 4) various fragments of SQL and Python (eg book recommendations based on borrowing) Yours Mark -- Mark Tearle - mark(a)tearle.com Stone: Let's stick to established procedures. -- The Andromeda Leavitt: Establishment gonna fall down and go boom. Strain (1971)

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Download(s)
by Ron Wickersham 28 Aug '00

28 Aug '00

nice to see this open source project. we are a small research library in a public astronomical observatory and are looking for such a system. i noticed that the link on the http://www.koha.org page for downoads is wrong. the link http://www.koha.org/downloads gives a 404 error. the correct link is http://www.koha.org/download. -ron Ron Wickersham Valley of the Moon Observatory Association http://vmoa.kenwood.ca.us Robert Ferguson Observatory project http://rfo.org rjw(a)rfo.org

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(Fwd) download of koha
by Rosalie Blake 28 Aug '00

28 Aug '00

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 12:23:13 -0600 From: john <john(a)colosys.net> To: rosalie(a)library.org.nz Subject: download of koha hey what you guys are doing is neat. we've been doing some work with waikato on indexing of newspapers using greenstone--you can look at what we're attempting at www.colosys.net/pathfinder and click on the newspaper digitization link. discoverd koha today. tried to download but it didn't seem to retreive a file--just saw the binaries. any help? first the america's cup, now two great open source library projects--must be something in the new zealand air. cheers. john campbell director pathfinder library system grand junction, colorado john(a)colosys.net ------- End of forwarded message -------

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