[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                   14 June, 2002
To the Koha community;

Hola,
As you can guess from my switch from Maori to Spanish, we've picked up
some new interest in Latin America.  I'm looking forward to seeing the
translation of documentation and our interface.  We hope that our new
volunteers will also want to jump in and start coding.  If you're
interested in helping in this effort, please feel free to contact me
directly or to jump onto the developer's mailing list[1] and get to
work.

Beyond reaching out to Latin America, we're trying to reach out to
other communities as well.  The OSS4Lib[2] community has been very
welcoming, and while we won't be attending their pre-ALA conference
this weekend we do hope to get to their next gathering.  The good
folks working on MARC::Record[3] have also been open and encouraging.
I hope that we'll be able to contribute back to them.

A final note on reaching out, I'm hoping that we can start a dialog
with the developers (and users) of the other Free Software Library
Systems that are out there.  While we've taken a number of different
approaches, I think there is a lot of room for cooperation.  We've got
a great opportunity to come together as a larger community, in a way
that no commercial system vendors could.  I hope that we'll take
advantage of it to create better, faster, more useful software for
libraries of all sizes.

   1.2
       Congratulations to Chris and everyone else who's been involved
       in this push.  1.2.0 is out and the developers are diving in to
       1.2.1!  1.2.0 represents a number of big improvements over the
       1.1 series, we've got an installation script, real
       documentation, improvements to searching, some clean ups of the
       database, more tests, and maybe a bug fix or two.

       You can get your very own copy at
       <https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16466>

   1.4
       Paul Poulain and Steve Tonnesen are continuing to work on the
       foundations of 1.4.  They've started working with the MARC API,
       and are starting to integrate the MARC::Record toolkit.  Now
       that the 1.2 series has hit the streets, look for things to
       pick up in 1.4!

   Translations
       While I've already mentioned the news about our progress on the
       Spanish side, we're continuing to look for volunteers to pick
       up more languages.  If your native language hasn't been
       mentioned so far let me know, I'd be happy to put you on our
       list of translations.  If a translation has already been
       started, I'm sure your contributions would be welcome.

   Documentation
       Nicholas Rosasco has been hard at work on the new Koha Manual.
       He's managed to put together a great book in a very short
       time.  He's got big plans for where to go next too.  Look for
       the documentation to just keep getting better!

I hope this note has found you all in good health and good spirits.
Enjoy our new release, and enjoy the start of summer!


Mucho gusto,
-pate


Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project


[1]  Please use the tools at
     <http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=16466> to subscribe to our
     development and/or announcement mailing lists.

[2]  See <http://www.oss4lib.org> for more information about this project.

[3]  See <http://marcpm.sourceforge.net> for more information