non librarian seeking understanding of tools
Would someone be willing to give a brief explanation of koha/opac/sitesearch differences for a non-librarian? I need to be able to tell librarians what jobs these tools will and will not do. I'm not sure what work is duplicated in the various products and what's unique in each. I know US librarians are always saying that if it doesn't use Marc, then they can't use it. So, is that yet another part that has to be added? David -- http://www.iteachnet.org http://members.iteachnet.org http://opensourceschools.org http://schoolforge.net member ------------------------------------------------ http://members.iteachnet.org/ http://www.opensourceschools.org/
Hi
Would someone be willing to give a brief explanation of koha/opac/sitesearch differences for a non-librarian? I need to be able to tell librarians what jobs these tools will and will not do.
Not sure if I can help - I'm neither a librarian nor a programmer however :-) KOHA : This is the name for the "product" the library system as a whole. The same as say "ExLibris" or "BookPlus". There are two main access points into Koha, the Librarians "view" which we talk about as "The Intranet" and the Publics "view" which we talk about as "The Opac". Opac seems to be a fairly meaningful library term which stands for "Online Public Access Catalogue". Because all of the functionality of Koha is delivered via a web-browser those seemed to be terms that made sense to us. I'm not sure where you got "site search" from in the context of Koha (there isn't one as part of koha). Usually that's a term used for a search engine that indexes and searches the parts of a libraries website that *are not* the catalogue. So basically it searches the parts of a library website that are the library hours, membership information, supplimentry info about the collections etc etc. On our sites (library and non library) we use htdig as a generic site search. Koha does not by defualt have a generic library site "attached" to it, although there is no reason why you couldn't add more HTML pages to it if you wanted to.
I'm not sure what work is duplicated in the various products and what's unique in each.
The Intranet and The Opac are two sides of the same coin - the Opac has more limited information displayed, because we assume you wouldn't want the public/members able to edit library information etc, and that they wouldn't want to see as much of the information held about a book (like the 3 or 4 "prices" for example). I know US librarians are always saying that if it doesn't use Marc,
then they can't use it. So, is that yet another part that has to be added?
You can import information from Marc format (always have been able to I think it was one of the first things someone tried to do) . However there is work very near completion on a more comprehensive support for Marc - so that you can get the information in more automatically, and also store and potentially export it back out again in Marc. Hope that answers your questions, if you'd like something more I'm happy to try and oblige. Chees Rachel _____________________________________________________________ Rachel Hamilton-Williams Katipo Communications WEBMISTRESS ph 021 389 128 or +64 04 934 1285 mailto:rachel@katipo.co.nz PO Box 12487, Wellington http://www.katipo.co.nz New Zealand Koha Open Source Library System http://www.koha.org
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first? If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration? If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure? Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin> R.
On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 10:47:23AM +1000, Roger Buck said:
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first?
If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration?
If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure?
Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin>
Yep warning is good, They arent really deleted tho, they are shifted into the deletedborrowers table. So it can be retrieved, i just havent written the undo script :-) Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 025 500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz
Hi Roger, We use koha, and have it set up so that we can't delete a borrower if they owe any money or have any books out, or have any outstanding reserves. This seems to be a pretty good safeguard against accidentle deletions. The other thought is that in catalogue maintenance there is an undelete biblio option. So the programming could be tweaked quite simply I imageine to undelete a borrower? cheers J. Roger Buck wrote:
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first?
If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration?
If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure?
Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin>
R. _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Hi Roger As one who used to use a programme that asked us at every step of the way if we were sure???, I can only say it drove me barmy. Chris's undelete option for the very rare instances when it would be needed seems preferable On 4 Apr 2002, at 10:47, Roger Buck wrote:
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first?
If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration?
If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure?
Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin>
R. _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Hi Rosalie, Rosalie Blake wrote:
Hi Roger As one who used to use a programme that asked us at every step of the way if we were sure???, I can only say it drove me barmy. Chris's undelete option for the very rare instances when it would be needed seems preferable
I know exactly what you mean about warning messages. An undelete option is great so long as it doesn't clutter the database... and I still like the idea of warning messages - so long as they can be turned off ;^) R.
On 4 Apr 2002, at 10:47, Roger Buck wrote:
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first?
If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration?
If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure?
Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin>
The undelete biblio option at the bottom of this page http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/maint/catmaintain.pl is a quick way to undo a mistake - and it is tucked away in an admistration 'bit' of Koha. It would be pretty cool to have an undelete borrowers option on a page somewhere which retrieves from the deleted borrowers table (as opposed to the borrowers table). J. Roger Buck wrote:
Hi Rosalie,
Rosalie Blake wrote:
Hi Roger As one who used to use a programme that asked us at every step of the way if we were sure???, I can only say it drove me barmy. Chris's undelete option for the very rare instances when it would be needed seems preferable
I know exactly what you mean about warning messages.
An undelete option is great so long as it doesn't clutter the database... and I still like the idea of warning messages - so long as they can be turned off ;^)
R.
On 4 Apr 2002, at 10:47, Roger Buck wrote:
Is there any way currently for a library db admin to simply disable user deletion.. or to prompt librarian with something like "Do you really want to do this?" first?
If not - does anyone think this is worth putting on a TODO list for future consideration?
If so,and going one step further, is it worth adding something like a systempreferences option to display 'warning.msg' prior to any deletion procedure?
Personally, I never make those kind of mistakes, but you know what some librarians are like! <grin>
_______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
participants (6)
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Chris Cormack -
David Bucknell -
Joann Ransom -
Rachel Hamilton-Williams -
Roger Buck -
Rosalie Blake