[Koha] SOS from Rome, Italy

[paul POULAIN]

jmulford at legionaries.org wrote:

>Friends down under and all over,
>
>I've been "observing" the list for several months from Rome, Italy and would
>like to ask a few specific questions, hoping that the answers will convince
>our Systems Engineer to choose KOHA over AMICUS.
>
>Here goes:
>
>1. Is the MARC and z39.50 support up to par for a major installation? I've
>seen activity in the list but would like to know the current status and
>future targets for these features.
>
Be careful, there are a lot of MARC standards. In France, we use 
UNIMARC. koha, for instance, claimed to be MARC21 compliant. there are 
only a few diffs between MARC standards, but there are.
In France, we use UNIMARC, and I will modify if there is a need to do so 
the marcimport and marcexport scripts to be UNIMARC and MARC21 
compliant. This is a must-have for me.
I think the ISO-2709 standard is our common meeting point, but I'm not 
really aware about that.

>2. Can KOHA confidently handle our 100,000+ multi-language volumes, with a
>growth rate of 10,000 a year? How far do you think KOHA can go, or is the
>sky the limit? Do you recommend MySQL or another DBase?
>
Nothing to add to katipo responses. MySQL is the BEST DB at selection. 
It may have some perfs problems on heavy update/insert traffic, but a 
soft like koha has really more SELECT than INSERT/UPDATE.

>6. Anyone at Katipo looking for a FREE fortnight in Rome - with a little
>KOHA customization on the side, of course? Offers are welcome. Seriously!
>(Chris, Rachel, Simon, ... You can answer off list if you prefer.)
>
If this happends, it could be an idea to organize a "koha meeting" in 
europe (maybe a "hard-coding meeting ???"), as I'm in France (Marseille, 
not too far from Italy)

Note there is a point you haven't asked for : italian version of koha.
I've investigated to find how to build a french version, it's not hard. 
You just have to follow README in translate directory. Note we are on 
the way to modify the tools used for koha, so, the translation method 
may differ. It won't be done in the next weeks anyway (after MARC 
compliance I think and propose)
--
Paul