hi all. a friend pointed me at the koha software and i've a few questions about it that i'm hoping someone can answer. in short, i'm a moderately skilled geek with zero *nix skills, but strong information architecture, and a high general computer proficency, and decent windose skills. i'm looking at doing some reasonably serious digging into linux in the next ~3 months. i'm one of two people recently placed in charge of a small privage research library that's had negligible maintance for ~20 years. i have quite good library research side skills, but neither of us have been on the admin side of one before. we have a varied selection of books, a number of which we wish to allow limited access to, for several reasons. slowly but surely our collection is being entered into an old version of file maker pro (because that's what our data processing volunter is familiar with on a moderate level) and being cross referenced with our old paper card catalogue and confirmed as books on hand. now while this is far from ideal it *does* get our catalogue into ... well, into the 20th century at least. long term, our goal is to get not only our catalogue online but to share it amongst several other private libraries, and ideally integrate it with a number of university and other research and rare books libraries. (as a side note, eventually another goal is to get a significant ammount of our rare books online in an e-book/pdf format for both public and research access, but that's a whole nother nightmare involving long nights with a right angle scanner, and getting ocr software to play with 1700 era german fonts) questions: -how much trouble am i looking at to import our extant cataloge into koha, multiple steps is fine, but manual is not pretty. i can get us running *reasonably* well for the time being and even online with filemaker, but clearly migrating to a standards compliant software sooner rather than later is a better option. -how hard is it going to be for my marginally computer adept, but intelligent, and data input adept volunteer who's a bit of an old dog to learn to input more titles? -how hard will it be to search/compare/semi autonomously add LOC cataloge numbers to known volumes? i know we have a number of privat printings that are probably not catalogued thus far, and will need to be hand numbered, but it'd be nice to not have to look up ALL of them. -how secure is koha when on line? -are there multiple levels of access? i.e. can i mask certain books that are flagged as do not check out from being seen by remote users, or a specific class of users, and yet leave them accessible to local users, or authorized logins? that's all i can think of for the moment. feel free to abuse me for my lack of knowledge about the software, etc. -m
Hi, I don't know filemaker, but if you can export as a tab delimited format you are half done. With some free tools, (especially MARCmaker, see http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html) you then will be able to transfer to MARC21 (assuming you use that format) and then run bulkmarcimport, to get your existing fields into Koha. I had to play around a bit, but it wasn't really hard and I have transferred all information I had from a tab delimited file. Again, assuming MARC21 (I don't think UNIMARC is all that different), once you have entered a few items manually you will have the hang of it. Koha wants minimally an author and title, with less it will refuse to add the book. For our library, we enter way more information than that, (Dewey numbers, barcodes, branch etc.) but author and title is the minimum. And, you always can go back and change things. What we think is a really great feature is the Z3950 search, we mostly use it when we have an ISBN number because that seems to be the fastest, but it is possible to search on title or author, although that tends to be (a lot) slower. Once it finds a book, it will ask you whether you want to import it, and if you decide to do so, it will fill in almost all fields. We use that a lot, because the old system only tracked title and author, and we like to be able to search on more than that. (Do you know what a book titled "Out on a broken limb" is about?.... Reincarnation... well, we did not really figure that from the title...) Our library is not on-line (yet), from what I learned about Linux, I would say that with SSH you are safer than Windows, but I am not a computer expert. Maybe someone else can help you out on that. I am not a computer expert, as I said, I am a CAD designer (computer aided design), and work with SolidWorks on Windows XP. I did not know a thing about Linux when I started with Koha, and we ran Linux because the Z3950 search at that time did not run on Windows. I believe it does now, but we will stick with Debian. We like to run legal software (church library :-) ) and, from work experience, I find Windows over priced and over rated. Here and there I have had some minor issues, but almost always solved quickly by posting in the Koha group or searching Google. As for limiting access, I cannot answer that question. Hope this helps a bit, Marty Jongepier Cedarview Community Church Library Newmarket, Ontario Canada questions: -how much trouble am i looking at to import our extant cataloge into koha, multiple steps is fine, but manual is not pretty. i can get us running *reasonably* well for the time being and even online with filemaker, but clearly migrating to a standards compliant software sooner rather than later is a better option. -how hard is it going to be for my marginally computer adept, but intelligent, and data input adept volunteer who's a bit of an old dog to learn to input more titles? -how hard will it be to search/compare/semi autonomously add LOC cataloge numbers to known volumes? i know we have a number of privat printings that are probably not catalogued thus far, and will need to be hand numbered, but it'd be nice to not have to look up ALL of them. -how secure is koha when on line? -are there multiple levels of access? i.e. can i mask certain books that are flagged as do not check out from being seen by remote users, or a specific class of users, and yet leave them accessible to local users, or authorized logins? that's all i can think of for the moment. feel free to abuse me for my lack of knowledge about the software, etc. -m _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
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