On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Nicholas Stephen Rosasco wrote:
What is Koha? What can Koha do? Where can I get Koha? Where did Koha Come From? Who or what is Katipo? Where is Horowhenua? Who maintains Koha? What is needed to run Koha? How do I install Koha? Where can I get help with databases? Where can I get help with Koha? Can I get Koha in my own language? How can I contribute to Koha?
Are you offering to mantain this FAQ, Nicholas? How about: What record formats does Koha support? Currently, Koha has a custom backend database for storing bibliographic information. Can I import/export MARC? It is currently possible to import MARC records, one at a time. Full MARC support is coming. How scalable is Koha (How big of a library system can it support?) Good question. I imagine that this would be a MySql issue, primarily. Big server, lots of ram. Comes down to what is an acceptable number of seconds for any given lookup to complete. Most important for circulation, I would think. Librarians probably don't want to wait for more than a second to complete a return, for example. This would require some benchmarking with real data. The next question would provide a rough guideline, although I'm confident that Koha could be scaled to libraries larger than mine and HDL. Who is using Koha? HDL x branches, y books, z patrons CMSD 6 branches, 8,000 books, 1,000 patrons What is the license? (Do I have to pay to use Koha?) Koha is distributed under the General Public License (GPL). More information on the GPL can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL The gist of the license is that you are free to use, modify and distribute the program at no cost to yourself, provided that your modifications are also released under the GPL. Under help with Koha... Can I pay for support? (If so, who?) I imagine you could. Katipo would probably accept new clients. I (Steve Tonnesen) could probably be talked into it. In the long run, it should be possible for people with less coding knowledge to supply Koha support as far as installation and use goes.. Can I pay for feature additions? (If so, who?) Katipo, Steve Tonnesen, others? It should be pointed out that Katipo and myself are primarily concerned with adding features that scratch our clients' particular itches. If you want a feature that doesn't appear to be on our radar, offering to pay for it will obviously speed up the process. Alternatively, you can hire somebody local to your organization with Perl programming skills to implement your changes. Steve.