[Koha] Introduction (fwd)

[Rachel Hamilton-Williams]

Cheers John,

Our hope is that another library who are more standards focused, and use 
MARC and Z3950 will pick those up as their contribution to the project - 
either getting us to write it, or having their own people do it.

Those things weren't *most* important to Horowhenua Library, so they aren't 
in these first releases. We at Katipo are always going to be most focused on 
those libraries that have commissioned changes and new modules, but we 
will gladly undertake new commisions, and help/colaborate with other 
projects.

There are other MARC projects and I think Z3950 project in the open source 
library community, and hooking in with them would be fantastic from our 
point of view.

Seriously we are unlikely to take over the world - certainly the american 
market is pretty daunting, but there are lots of other libraries just like ours 
we're sure who have to pay for MARC and end up throwing most of it away 
anyway, who have time but not $$, or who want more control over their own 
destiny.

> i hope too that koha takes over the world.  but it's ultimately going to
> come down to two factors in my mind:  stability and standards.

We are very conscious of stability - and running over crappy lines on crappy 
gear is one of the situations we've engineered for.  We are rewriting modules 
that have been giving us trouble, and fully expect to continue to refine the  
system. We have an expectation of no unplanned server downtime other than 
from gear failure, no more than "normal" browser flakeyness, and no core 
dumps on the telnet circ module

Standards - well we are lead by our librarians - personnally I wouldn't know a 
library standard if it hit me on the head, they tell me how the library runs, and 
we make a system that facilitates that.   

Cheers
Rachel
_____________________________________________________________

Rachel Hamilton-Williams             Katipo Communications            
WEBMISTRESS                          ph  025 300 825 or +64 04 389 1285 
mailto:rachel at katipo.co.nz           PO Box 7039, Wellington
http://www.katipo.co.nz              New Zealand