[Koha] Thinking of Koha

[Kivilahti Olli-Antti]

Hello Koha!
and greetings from the Joensuu Regional library, Finland.

18 months ago we made a feature comparison between Koha and Evergreen.
Both ILS' stood out equal, but Evergreen won based on it's existing
merits in consortial operations against it's inherent development hardships.

Those hardships have manifested and we are facing rather strenous
challenges here, including localization challenges and challenges in
making simple things like z39.50 searches function with our national
catalogs, not to mention the sad state of the serials module,
notifications and action triggers and general slow speed of development
we are facing here. Not to mention frustratingly poor code documentation.
This has led me to question our direction.

So I took another look yesterday at the Koha-community, installed the
community Koha, configured and tested our national z39.50-targets,
loaded several localizations. I am looking forward to achieving a lot
more today.

Also Koha has evolved a lot during the past 18 months we have been
focusing on Evergreen. After a brief look it seems that we should
re-evaluate our stand on Koha.

-Do you have any idea if there is somekind of an updated feature list
for Koha?
-Do you have a personal suggestion about differences between Koha and
Evergreen communities?
-Do you have anyone in mind who could take a look at our requirements
specification and evaluate it's compliance level to Koha? We have around
300 short and simple requirement tickets that needs to be evaluated and
a handful of process schematics.
-Any opinions about Koha performance on a medium public library? Max 100
000 patrons, 300 000 bibliographic records. 1 000 000 items.

I feel it would be reasonable for us to change our direction if Koha
provides stable performance and the most basic functionality on all
library modules (serials, circulation, acquisitions, reporting,
notifications, templates, cataloguing, interfaces etc.). I am yet to
analyze the architecture and code documentation, but based on the Koha
API descriptions I am feeling extremely positive.

We are targeting Q1/Q2 of 2014 for our ILS migration and are also
willing to pay for migration support for the COMMUNITY version of Koha.
Support would mostly focus on daily library operations and
configurations. Most utility tasks regarding ILS migration have "almost"
been resolved, like data migration, municipal participation and
cooperation agreements, server hosting.

Olli-Antti Kivilahti
Project Manager
Open Library 2014
Joensuu Regional Library

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