Emiliano: Nice to have news from you, you've been silent for a long time. Last year I've been in Rosario Argentina, giving a presentation of the work done in Uruguay, specifically at ORT University. There I meet a team from La Plata, that works in the School of economics, their Koha installation can be seen here: http://catalogo.econo.unlp.edu.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl . Do you have any relationship with them?. Maybe if you can't find funding for contributing you changes to the main project you can leave the source code somewhere, in order to let interested people to port your source code to the main tree. Andres Emiliano Marmonti wrote:
Hello everybody again
As I was mentioned in the list, and think there is an error or some kind of mis-understanding, I feel in the obligation to answer in both languages trying to clarify some things.
Roxana: Actually I'm working as an external consultant for one of La Plata University schools, but in my knowledge La Plata University as an institution doesn't commercialize Koha, trough me or through anybody.
My actuall freelance work is related to a branch of Koha, that we named Koha-BDF and it's logo says "Based in Koha" as you can see in the instances that we have:
http://biblio.fisica.unlp.edu.ar http://biblio.exactas.unlp.edu.ar (two in La Plata) http://bibliotecas.umsa.bo (Bolivia)
The main differences are related to the cataloging interface, that we don't use Koha's native and we use UNESCO-IsisMarc, performing some modifications and enhacements. In the other hand, we don't use Authorities Module, or Serial Module. We changed circulation procedures adapting to some common latinoamerican libraries problems, MARC-Koha DB mapping also was changed, trying to adapt the majority of MARC21 fields. and some other things. Personally I'm working in a Perl Tk interface for replacing one DB/Text Inmagic instance.
As you could see in my public presentations (unfortunately in spanish), for instance in
http://www.amicus.udesa.edu.ar/3bibliotecadigital/ponencias/rocca.html
I allways tell that we are not the official release of Koha, and hope in some moment to have enough funding for joining our changes or contributing for the official release.
Reading your mail, anybody could suppose that I commercialize (or La Plata University!) Koha OSS, making some kind of lie, or hidding the oficial release of Koha. It's true that I receive money for my services, but are not related to the software (inclusive Koha BDF itself): we created special material and made 4 instances of Perl+Koha training courses for programmers, I've made conversion more of 35 databases to MARC21 and inserting into Koha, and processed Excel worksheets and obtained through Z3950 free services, more than 3000 MARC21 records for different libraries based in ISBN.
In the meantime, 5 computer science students has learned Perl, Koha (BDF) and MARC21, and they helped me to accomplish this services to different libraries, actually for instance in Bolivia there are 3 programmers adapting our solution to specifical problems related to a big university.
Well that's all, hope have been clear. Regards to all. Emiliano.