5 July, 2002 To the Koha community; hello, This week, we've got something to celebrate! Yesterday was the day we celebrate our Independence in the United States. I think that we're well on our way to declaring our independence from proprietary library systems. Koha is moving along nicely, and it seems that other porjects that dovetail nicely with ours are doing well to. 1.2 1.2.1 hit the streets yesterday. It included improvements to the installer, the inclusion of sample data (for testing), improvements in the Z39.50 system, and a number of bugfixes. Chris has plans for more improvements in the 1.2 series, but we'd encourage you to install 1.2.1 instead of waiting. The newer 1.2 releases will be a very simple upgrade from your existing systems, which means less pain for you. Getting involved in 1.2 now means that you'll have the opportunity to help steer the project through your input, which means more gain for you. Less pain and more gain is a win all the way around. Translations This is the first note that will be translated (as far as I know). I'm looking forward to seeing a whole new group becoming involved in Koha as each set of translations starts up. If you're interested in translating this or other Koha documents, please get in touch with me (<kaitiaki@koha.org>) to find out if anyone else is working in your language already. Community We've had another Koha support vendor start up this week, this time in Nigeria. Beyond this, we're starting to talk in more detail with librarians about helping to steer the project. Two big developments outside the Koha project are worth noting: * the MARC::Record project has released version 1.00 of their software. This is a big step for them, and represents a major win for the larger free software for libraries community. * a new project is starting up to develop a SIP and NCIP module for Perl. This project is already talking to some Koha developers as well as the people in the MyLibrary project. We're already using MARC::Record in our 1.4 development, and are looking forward to having SIP/NCIP tools that we can merge into Koha as well. Projects like this are a great boon to us and to other library projects. I'd encourage anyone with the skills and interest to support worthy projects like this in any way you can. A project is underway to start developing a larger organization to help coordinate work within free software for library projects. As more information develops, I'll share it here. Koha is continuing to build momentum and the community is growing as well. This really is your chance to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new endeavor. Whether you choose to get involved in Koha, MyLibrary, MARC::Record, the new SIP/NCIP project, or some other Free Software project doesn't matter, what matters is that you get involved. You can write code if you're able, write documentation if you're up to it, or test new software releases if you have the hardware. There are a lot of ways that you can get involved, the important thing is that you do. happy hacking, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project