Hi Jeff On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 04:45:14PM -0400, Jeff Yamamoto said:

I'm very new with Koha (and library cataloging for that matter) so please excuse my newbie questions.

No problem. [snip]

- Some of the books are very old but most have an ISBN number. Where can I download the book information so I don't have to manually input the info for each of the books/videos/etc.

Yes you can, if you can find a z3950 server which has them catalogued in Japanese (im assuming you want them catalogued in Japanese) Koha can fetch records from z3950 servers such as the server at the Library of Congress.

- Has Koha ever been deployed in a Japanese library? I've installed Koha on XP and Japanese characters can be inputted and displayed but will it search properly with Japanese characters?

I have seen Japanese Koha installs on my googles about in the past. I found this page too http://www.nul.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~okamoto/oss/koha.html Which might be interesting, I used google translate to read it, and it looks like it contains some interesting links to pdfs.

- Are there any "skins" or templates that simplifies or customizes the Koha GUI?

Yes there are, if you take a look at say http://www.rangitikeilibrary.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl or http://www.library.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl or http://opac.liblime.com/ On this last one, you can switch to Japanses, give it a try, its very cool :)

- I'm assuming you can use a barcode scanner during check in/out of the books but are there any recommended bar code scanners in the market?

Anything that operates as a keyboard widget is fine, ie if you open up a text editor, and scan something, and text appears. That scanner will work fine :)

Thanks in advance.

Hope this helps Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 027 4500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz