twc library wrote:

I have just installed koha from CVS, and am running into a number of problems.

One problem is when I am trying to add a new item without ISBN from acqui.simple, I get to the second section, then click add and jump back to the first section, quite anoying. I get the following error in error-logs:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: Unknown column 'lccn' in 'field list' at /home/twc/koha/cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbooks.pl line 216.

You are missing a column from one of your tables... You probably won't use it, but I seem to remember that the 'lccn' column must be present (in biblioitems ?) to satisfy the current code in addbooks.pl Try changing directory to /your-path-to/cgi-bin/koha/update/ and then do this from the command-line: perl ./updatedatabase run perl --help and look at the command line options if you get error messages (especially regarding perl path) Let us know if that doesn't solve it.

My next question is, at this time all we have for our small library is just the author, title, sometimes the Dewey#, will this work okay with koha to use only this information?

Almost :) - You probably will need to add information to a few extra columns... but this can be very simple; Using 'auto-increment'.. or manually creating one list of numbers will probably be all you'd need - with the same list used for multiple columns (barcode, biblionumber and biblioitemnumber). If you had one thousand items then a simple list of numbers from 1 - 1000 would probably do the lot.

And we would like to add information for each book at a later time if koha works well for our needs, cand this be done?

Yes - simplest way is either import more items into the database in tab delimited, or manually via /cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbooks.pl

And last question, about adding these items, right now they are separated by categories (adult, children, tapes, etc) and in a list separated by tabs, with: dewey author title (copies) can this be imported in some way?

Yes.

or what would I have to import into Mysql for each item to be added?

If using MySQL, then the easiest way is to create your empty koha tables and then use 'mysqlimport' utility to import the tab delimited stuff (mysqlimport is part of the mysql client bundle). One thing that you may need to tidy up - If your items are listed by category, then you may end up haveing to do find a way to deal with managing/editing data for lots of duplicate items in your tab-delimited file. Some words of warning - Be prepared for a few trial runs and plenty of copy and paste before committing to a final production run. R.