Hi there, I can certainly appreciate the tenuous situation, here are hopefully some helpful answers :-) : ----- "ils shopping" <ils.shopping@gmail.com> wrote:

Folks, I'm in a library that may soon break away from a consortium. Actually it's a certainty but I've been asked to conduct my research quietly. I apologize in advance for questions your probably tired of seeing. No, questions we don't mind at all :-)

1) We currently are on a shared Sirsi Unicorn system with several other libraries. I've been assured that we can export all of the data from the system administrator. He is a good guy who I believe will extract everything possible. He tells me that everything including old transactions can be exported. I see there is a Winnebago to Koha plugin to aid with that migration. Is there a simillar plugin or instructions on how to perform a migration using Sirsi Unicorn. If not I'm willing to contribute towards that form of project. Generally, I think folks are afraid to share their ILS-specific migration toolkits publicly. LibLime's attorneys have recommended that we don't provide access to them under the terms of an OSS license due to potential litigation issues ... so it's not likely you'll be able to find this piece ...

The good news is that you're probably dealing with standard format exports into MARC21 for the bib and auth data ... and the other data will likely be available via your reporting module in CSV or another simple format that's easy to manipulate into a Koha-friendly format. Also, I should mention, there are companies that will do all of this for you: http://koha.org/support/pay.html ... and I know of at least one that has worked with Unicorn data ;-).

2) Book jackets in the catalog. My boss truly covets book jackets in the library catalog is this possible with run of the mill Koha or does it require the LibLime version. Is this a subscription service. No! The Amazon.com module has been generally available for about 2 years, all you have to do is flip the switch in the system preferences and add your amazon.com developers key and associates tag and the images start showing up.

3) SIP and NCIP. Does it? SIP2 is supported by I think 3 modules ... the most stable one that will appear in 3.x series is probably the one you want. It should be committed in the next month or so.

4) Can you import records using Connexion from OCLC or is it strictly import by Z39.50? You can import OCLC records into the reservoir; and with a bit of customization, you could tweak that import to insert directly into the database. There is a future feature that will allow you to set up 'overlays' for types of imports (meaning that you could set it up to overlay based on the OCLC number or ISBN, etc.).

5) Reports how detailed? Can you use something like Crystal Reports as an interface? We are just in the testing phases of the new report writer, that'll appear shortly. You can always use a report writer like Crystal Reports or PHPMyAdmin since you've got direct access to the database.

6) SMS, IM, Email, and Mail notices. Do these capabilitites exist? There's a SMS gateway that Near East University created, I'm not sure it's made it into the next version, but it could certainly be slated for a future version. Chris Cormack developed a basic IM gateway that could be spruced up for production given some attention. Email and Mail notices are available currently.

Probably enough for now in the question department.

Cool, let us know if you have any more. Sincerely, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS