[I started to send this directly to Thomas Green, but decided to send it to the list as well, since it might be of use to some folks. My apologies if it isn't.] First, sorry for the delay in responding. I've been multitasking at the very limits of my capacity for the past few days. :-) I started looking at Koha last summer as a possible replacement for the medical library where I work, and then I got interested in using it for a couple of my own projects. First, when I'm not doing medical library stuff, I take my photographs around to craft shows, where I sell enough to make it interesting, though not enough to quit my day job. I'm working on designing a Koha catalog of my photographs, complete with subject headings, so I can, for example, put in "cherry trees" and get all the cherry tree pictures. (I live in the Washington, DC, area, so cherry tree pictures are very popular.) So far, I've designed the MARC structure and the biblio entry forms to accommodate photographs, and now I have to put the data in. There are probably better photo database programs, but this is mostly a way to teach myself Koha. Second, I've been cataloging my own book collection since about 1992, and the next project is to transfer it from MS Access to Koha. That one is still in the "one of these days I want to do it" stage. It's not exactly a special collection, but I am going to have to design some specialized MARC fields for some of the information. If there's any interest in how I'm doing either, I'd be happy to write up my experiences and add them to the Koha documentation. They're both kind of strange projects, but someone might get some use out of them, and I'd like to be able to contribute to the Koha project in some way. I don't know when I'll be finished, though. I started out with the 2.2.9 VMWare version, which I highly recommend to practice on. All you have to do is install the VMWare player, open the image, get the IP address using ifconfig, and you're ready to go. The best part is that when you make an absolute mess of things, you can just wipe out the VMWare image and start over. (Completely over, that is, from the very beginning, but I tended to make an absolute mess before I had gotten very far, so I hadn't invested a lot of time in it.) You can also save an image, make a copy, and make a mess of *that* one. You'll lose some things, but not everything. Right now, I'm using the Windows version, mainly because I'm more familiar with Windows than Linux, and the Windows version works better as a standalone system on my (Windows) laptop. YMMV. Hope this helps, Fred King phred@philobiblios.net Thomas Green writes:

Hello All,

I am looking for some generic information on Koha. I am interested in using Koha in a special collections library environment which potentially has different needs than those of a more traditional library. I am wondering if anyone here has any advice or suggestions for using Koha in this type of environment. If you have implemented Koha in a special collections library, what were the challenges? Would you recommend using Koha for this? Perhaps this is not the correct forum for this question. If not, perhaps someone could direct me to the proper place.

Thanks in advance, Tom _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha