Hi Folks, I just ran across KOHA and am quite excited. I've always felt that library automation software was ridiculously expensive and would be an ideal candidate for a copyleft project -- kudos to those of you that have tackled this! Perusing the web site I find myself full of questions as to the exact capabilities and features of KOHA. For example, does it handle distribution; bar coding, scanning and things like that? What are its exact functions and capabilities? To give you an idea of the angle I'm coming from, I'm the technology coordinator for a public school district here in New Hampshire in the U.S.. I'd love to get some software to replace the ancient card catalogs that our students are using. Of course, the librarians of our two schools would love to be able to bar scan books to check them out, to generate reports of whose book is late, and to merge the catalogs of our two schools. Any whacks with a clue-bat, pointers, descriptions of capabilities, and other info for a KOHA newbie would be greatly appreciated -- TIA. Regards, . Randy
hi Randy
Perusing the web site I find myself full of questions as to the exact capabilities and features of KOHA. For example, does it handle distribution; bar coding, scanning and things like that? What are its exact functions and capabilities?
What's distribution? Is that circulation - issues and returns - if so yes, this runs a medium sized public library right now - so issues and returns, various branches etc. Yes does barcode scanning - am surprised by how often this comes up - we couldn't imagine that a system wouldn't do it - so don't think to make a big deal of it - is like "does it take a keyboard" :-) we are working to revise the original RFP/spec documents and database structure diagrams - as what we planned and what turned out are somewhat different. However it has what we consider to be the "normal" functionality of a public library system - ie a system to run a public library :-) Specifically: catalogue, members (patrons to the USA peoples), circulation, acquisitions, opac - is light in the areas of built in reports - we've been using a 3rd party report writer which is clunky - although fine if you know how to write SQL queries. More specifically than that - it doesn't curently import MARC records as such - primarily we haven't needed too, but there is a project to do that underway that we're hoping to tap into. It doesn't currently do Z3950 - again not something the people who commissioned the system needed right now - so hasn't been written. It DOES do reserves, fines, overdues, and knows about branches, and definitly if you had 2 schools running it you could merge the catalogues. AS it is now they could be two branches of one library - but we also want to be able to have a sort of meta library layer that lets them be 2 seperate libraries, but have joint catalogue.
Any whacks with a clue-bat, pointers, descriptions of capabilities, and other info for a KOHA newbie would be greatly appreciated
We went public with it about 6 weeks ago and have been blown away by the response - so are madly trying to get the documentation etc more accurate so we can make it available cheers Rachel _____________________________________________________________ Rachel Hamilton-Williams Katipo Communications WEBMISTRESS ph 025 300 825 or +64 04 389 1285 mailto:rachel@katipo.co.nz PO Box 7039, Wellington http://www.katipo.co.nz New Zealand
participants (2)
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Rachel Hamilton-Williams -
Randy Edwards