Koha@Buffalo continues
Greetings one and all. This past January, we began using Koha to catalogue two special collections in the State University of New York at Buffalo. We have run practicums for Master's students in library studies, with the intention of providing access to a unique colledtion of books and archaeological field notes housed in the Classics Department,involving about six volunteers. The students were impressed enough to set up a discussion for their colleagues in April. This project will continue in September. A second project involves the university's teaching and learning collection of materials to support instructors. Chien-Lin Liu, the UB Koha guru, has produced a custom Web interface which allows access to these collections, and provides a feedback bulletin board to collect student experiences and suggestions. We have not finished analyzing these, but will post summaries when available. Our ongoing use of Koha in the classroom continued during the first Summer session here in the University at Buffalo. About 17 students in a course on UNIX/Linux systems administration mounted Koha servers as part of their six-week course. One suggestion which arose from both of these experiences was that a more typical MARC table be included in the generic Koha parameters. A "cheat sheet" of "most frequently used" MARC tags was procured from the campus libraries, and we would be happy to share the specs.For instance, the publisher field designations currently include only the date ($c), not the place and publisher fields of the MARC 260 tag. This is confusing for newbies to MARC. The Library of Congress does publish a compact MARC brochure for about $10, but we think it might help to turn on the most frequently used tags and subfields from the get-go. At any rate, we now have a couple of dozen newly-minted open-source enthusiasts here - about six cataloguers and about seventeen budding sysadmins.I'm allowing for one or two who might not yet be convinced. :) -- Christopher Brown-Syed, PhD, Editor, Library and Archival Security. University at Buffalo School of Informatics <clb24@buffalo.edu>
I have loaded a new document on my website that documents the process of installing Koha on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (AS v.3). You can find it at http://www.skemotah.com/KohaRHinstall.html My thanks to Saint Vladimirs Orthodox Theological Seminary and Dn. Kirill Sokolov for providing access to the Red Hat Network, allowing me to develop this document. Thanks also to Joshua Ferraro, whose instructions for installing Koha on Debian served as a guide. Please let me know of any errors or omissions you see in the document. Thanks! -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com
Christopher Brown-Syed a écrit :
One suggestion which arose from both of these experiences was that a more typical MARC table be included in the generic Koha parameters. A "cheat sheet" of "most frequently used" MARC tags was procured from the campus libraries, and we would be happy to share the specs.For instance, the publisher field designations currently include only the date ($c), not the place and publisher fields of the MARC 260 tag. This is confusing for newbies to MARC. The Library of Congress does publish a compact MARC brochure for about $10, but we think it might help to turn on the most frequently used tags and subfields from the get-go.
good news. I'll add something : in the 2.2 installer, there is a new feature that the library can use (during install stage only) to select various files to "import" into it's default database to get a 100% working Koha and avoid lot of "standard tweakings". In french UNIMARC, for example, we already hare the file for "cataloguing monography", one for "cataloguing electronic document", one for "french stopwords"... We may even have UNIMARC authority files. Feel free to dump marc_*_structure tables, send them to me with some comments (in what are they different from default 2.0.0 MARC21 parameters setup ?). I'll try to add them to official 2.2 release. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
participants (3)
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Christopher Brown-Syed -
Paul POULAIN -
Stephen Hedges