[Koha] non librarian seeking understanding of tools

[Rachel Hamilton-Williams]

Hi

> Would someone be willing to give a brief explanation of koha/opac/sitesearch
> differences for a non-librarian? I need to be able to tell librarians what jobs
> these tools will and will not do.

Not sure if I can help - I'm neither a librarian nor a programmer however :-)

KOHA : This is the name for the "product" the library system as a whole.  
The same as say "ExLibris" or "BookPlus".  

There are two main access points into Koha, the Librarians "view" which we 
talk about as "The Intranet" and the Publics "view" which we talk about as 
"The Opac". Opac seems to be a fairly meaningful library term which stands 
for "Online Public Access Catalogue".

Because all of the functionality of Koha is delivered via a web-browser those 
seemed to be terms that made sense to us.

I'm not sure where you got "site search" from in the context of Koha (there 
isn't one as part of koha).  Usually that's a term used for a search engine 
that indexes and searches the parts of a libraries website that *are not* the 
catalogue. So basically it searches the parts of a library website that are the 
library hours, membership information, supplimentry info about the 
collections etc etc.  

On our sites (library and non library) we use htdig as a generic site search.

Koha does not by defualt have a generic library site "attached" to it, although 
there is no reason why you couldn't add more HTML pages to it if you 
wanted to.

> I'm not sure what work is duplicated in the various products and what's unique
> in each.

The Intranet and The Opac are two sides of the same coin - the Opac has 
more limited information displayed, because we assume you wouldn't want 
the public/members able to edit library information etc, and that they wouldn't 
want to see as much of the information held about a book (like the 3 or 4 
"prices" for example).

 I know US librarians are always saying that if it doesn't use Marc,
> then they can't use it. So, is that yet another part that has to be added?

 You can import information from  Marc format (always have been able to I 
think it was one of the first things someone tried to do) . However there is 
work very near completion on a more comprehensive support for Marc - so 
that you can get the information in more automatically, and also store and 
potentially export it back out again in Marc.

Hope that answers your questions, if you'd like something more I'm happy to 
try and oblige.

Chees
Rachel
_____________________________________________________________

Rachel Hamilton-Williams             Katipo Communications            
WEBMISTRESS                          ph  021 389 128 or +64 04 934 1285 
mailto:rachel at katipo.co.nz           PO Box 12487, Wellington
http://www.katipo.co.nz              New Zealand
Koha Open Source Library System
http://www.koha.org