21 June, 2002 To the Koha community; Howdy, We've been busy this last week, both within the project and in the wider scope of library software in general. 1.2.1 is out (see below), more people are getting involved in the MARC work for 1.4, people are popping up with offers to translate Koha, discussions are now underway with a number of other Free Software developers about pooling resources, and a couple of more libraries are starting to move towards Koha as a production system. Koha is looking very healthy. 1.2 1.2.1 is undergoing a final review before its release, and contains fixes to all the known bugs that crept into 1.2.0. We're looking forward to a 1.2.2 release soon. Chris is hinting that it will include branch transfers and extended options for OPAC. 1.4 Paul has published some information about his 1.4 plans[1], included in his To Do list is a call for volunteers, please take him up on it. The biggest thing that Paul wants to get done is to test the MARC API. For this to work, the old module code needs to be rewritten to use the new API. If you're looking for a place to put your hard earned Perl skills to good use, this would be it. Note that only the modules (representing the API) will be changing. It is our intent that scripts will still call the old functions, using the same parameters. The big win here is that for most programmers, there will be no extra work to use the new code within existing code. A new MARC acquistion system should be written to fully exploit the new capabilities Translations Wow! Thanks to volunteers in the community, we've got people working on (or getting ready to): Spanish French Portuguese Bengali Hindi We're also trying to come up with some standards and tools to help make this whole process easier. The program itself isn't quite ready for easy translation (the templates mentioned above will turn the trick here), but there are a number of things that could be translated. If you're interested, we'd love to have the INSTALL document, the Manual, and these notes[2] translated into as many languages as possible. Documentation Nick has done a wonderful job in putting this together, and now Rosalie Blake and some of her staff at HLT are hard at work on a users manual to expand what's available. If you've been using Koha and have thoughts about what needs to go into the documentation, or are willing to volunteer to help write, proofread, mark up, etc. -- please, contact Nick on the koha-devel mailing list[3]. IRC Meeting In all of the work and excitement surrounding the 1.2.0 release, we managed to miss our regularly scheduled IRC meeting. I apologize to any who planned on attending. Let's try again on June 27th at 2200 GMT. A preliminary agenda includes: 1.2 schedule 1.4 plans thoughts on templating translations community (Koha, and the larger OSS4lib, and the larger library community) cross referencing Community Nick has put together a great Request For Comments and sent it out to many of the project leaders working on Open Source projects related to libraries. So far the results are encouraging. At the same time, I've put together a mailing list to discuss providing commercial support for Koha[4]. Katipo[5] is already doing a wonderful job of this, and has been very supportive of others stepping up to start doing so as well. I believe very strongly that a deep pool of commercial support providers around the world will help to strengthen the Koha community, and provide greater incentive for libraries to consider using Koha. Even with as much as we've done, I'm excited to see what the future holds. It certainly looks rosy to me. Ya'll come back now, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project [1] Please see <http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=ToDoMARC>. [2] If you're interested in translating these notes, please contact me and I'll get you a draft copy early, then send you the final the day before I send it out generally. I ask that you do two things in return, post the translation to any suitable mailing list or web site in your native language, and please send me a copy for archiving at my website <http://pate.eylerfamily.org>. [3] subscribe at <http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=16466> [4] You can subscribe by sending an email to <kohabiz-subscribe@eylerfamily.org> and following the directions you receive. [5] <www.katipo.co.nz>