Aug 30, 2002 To the Koha community Welcome. This has been a busy two weeks, both personally and for the Koha project. I hope that I can do justice to the different things that have happened. If I've missed something, I apologize, please feel free to email me (kaitiaki@koha.org) a reminder. The best news over the last two weeks is that more and more libraries are choosing Koha (see the announcements below). If you've recently made the decision to move to Koha, or are currently finishing a migration, please let me know. We have a couple of projects in the works which we could use your help with. 1.2 1.2.3 should be out in September. It will include templating throughout the OPAC, maybe online help, and some installation improvements. It is currently in testing, and we would welcome feedback from current Koha users. If you need help setting up a testing environment, please contact the developers mailing list, there are several people who would be glad to help. 1.2.4 should be out by the end of 2002. It will be the last 'new feature' release in the 1.2 cycle. (We may make more 1.2 releases, but they will contain nothing but bug fixes.) 1.4 We're on the verge of releasing 1.3.0 ... this will be the first alpha release of the 1.4 series. We'll continue making 1.3 series releases until we hit a level of completeness and stability that warrants making 1.4.0, hopefully late in 2002 or early in 2003. If you're interested in the future of Koha, this is where to look. 1.4 development will get a boost with a financial contribution from Nelsonville Public Library. They have chosen to migrate their ILS to Koha, and are going to be paying for some of the MARC Support development work that is central to the 1.4 release. I'm encouraging Koha developers (and other Perl developers) to look at their announcement at http://pate.eylerfamily.org/geek/MARCRFP.txt and consider making a proposal. Translations The french and german teams are coalescing, and both have email lists at this point. Chris Cormack, of Katipo, will have a demo of the templating code being used for translation shortly. Once that is in hand, the translators can go to town! We've also got some translations in for the Bengali and Hindi languages. Community Nelsonville Public Library (7 branches, 36,000 active patrons, and over 250,000 items in their collection) has decided to migrate to Koha. A press release has gone out, and additional stories seem to be brewing. With the kind of interest that this has generated, I'd like to continue to produce press releases for other libraries moving to Koha. If you've recently decided to make the switch, and wouldn't mind a little publicity, please contact me and we'll see what we can put together. I'm really impressed with all of the dedication and effort that have been made over the last 3 months. I think we're starting to see the fruits of our labors. happy hacking, Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project