[Koha] is koha right for our project run by volunteers?

[Mark Tompsett]

Greetings,

I would say yes!


My 7 year old son was able to understand how to catalog some of his books 
using Z39.50 (https://tml.tulongaklatan.ph/). Though, he has some books 
through Scholastic which issue their own ISBN numbers for existing books, so 
you have to get a little creative in finding it by the Title, and then 
adding the extra ISBN number, but that really is about the most complex 
we've had to do. Generally, the ISBN search has worked well, though 
sometimes we had to search both the ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 numbers before 
finding something.

The Z39.50 functionality of Koha makes entry easy, by importing the entries 
from an external source which already has the entered data. I would 
recommend trying that. You will need to go item by item, but given that you 
have to manually catalog the whole library, I don't think that is going to 
be a big problem.

GPML,
Mark Tompsett

-----Original Message----- 
From: Rebecca Shtasel
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2017 9:29 AM
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] is koha right for our project run by volunteers?

Hello

We are a small group of volunteers (one of whom is a retired school
librarian) who run our synagogue's library in the UK.  We would like to
produce an online catalogue and are interesting in using Koha for this
purpose as we haven't much money.  The library has about 4000 books
covering a variety of classifications (fiction, history etc) all related to
Judaism.  The original accessions book was lost when the library had to be
moved a year ago and we have a notebook with handwritten entries for the
accessions we have received since the library moved to its new home.
Looking at the information to do with koha it appears very technical and we
are wondering if we will be able to use it for our catalogue.  We would
literally be taking books off the shelves to input their information, not
importing the data from elsewhere and  none of us has anything more than
basic computing knowledge.

Given this, do you think koha is too complicated for us to use or amongst
all the information related to using koha is there a very basic guide that
would suit beginners like us?
If you think we would struggle using koha, could you advise us on software
that you think would be more user-friendly and is not too expensive?

Thanking you all very much in advance for any advice you can give.

Rebecca (on behalf of the group)
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