[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                   21 June, 2002
To the Koha community;

Howdy,
We've been busy this last week, both within the project and in the
wider scope of library software in general.  1.2.1 is out (see below),
more people are getting involved in the MARC work for 1.4, people are
popping up with offers to translate Koha, discussions are now underway
with a number of other Free Software developers about pooling
resources, and a couple of more libraries are starting to move towards
Koha as a production system.   Koha is looking very healthy.


   1.2
    1.2.1 is undergoing a final review before its release, and
    contains fixes to all the known bugs that crept into 1.2.0.  We're
    looking forward to a 1.2.2 release soon.  Chris is hinting that it
    will include branch transfers and extended options for OPAC.

   1.4
    Paul has published some information about his 1.4 plans[1],
    included in his To Do list is a call for volunteers, please take
    him up on it.  The biggest thing that Paul wants to get done is to
    test the MARC API.  For this to work, the old module code needs to
    be rewritten to use the new API.  If you're looking for a place to
    put your hard earned Perl skills to good use, this would be it.

    Note that only the modules (representing the API) will be
    changing.  It is our intent that scripts will still call the old
    functions, using the same parameters.  The big win here is that
    for most programmers, there will be no extra work to use the new
    code within existing code.  A new MARC acquistion system should be
    written to fully exploit the new capabilities

   Translations
    Wow!  Thanks to volunteers in the community, we've got people
    working on (or getting ready to):
       Spanish
       French
       Portuguese
       Bengali
       Hindi
    We're also trying to come up with some standards and tools to help
    make this whole process easier.  The program itself isn't quite
    ready for easy translation (the templates mentioned above will
    turn the trick here), but there are a number of things that could
    be translated.  If you're interested, we'd love to have the
    INSTALL document, the Manual, and these notes[2] translated into as
    many languages as possible.

   Documentation
    Nick has done a wonderful job in putting this together, and now
    Rosalie Blake and some of her staff at HLT are hard at work on a
    users manual to expand what's available.  If you've been using
    Koha and have thoughts about what needs to go into the
    documentation, or are willing to volunteer to help write,
    proofread, mark up, etc. -- please, contact Nick on the koha-devel
    mailing list[3].

   IRC Meeting
    In all of the work and excitement surrounding the 1.2.0 release,
    we managed to miss our regularly scheduled IRC meeting.  I
    apologize to any who planned on attending.  Let's try again on
    June 27th at 2200 GMT.  A preliminary agenda includes:
       1.2 schedule
       1.4 plans
       thoughts on templating
       translations
       community (Koha, and the larger OSS4lib, and the larger library
            community)
       cross referencing

   Community
    Nick has put together a great Request For Comments and sent it out
    to many of the project leaders working on Open Source projects
    related to libraries.  So far the results are encouraging.

    At the same time, I've put together a mailing list to discuss
    providing commercial support for Koha[4].  Katipo[5] is already
    doing a wonderful job of this, and has been very supportive of
    others stepping up to start doing so as well.  I believe very
    strongly that a deep pool of commercial support providers around
    the world will help to strengthen the Koha community, and provide
    greater incentive for libraries to consider using Koha.

Even with as much as we've done, I'm excited to see what the future
holds.  It certainly looks rosy to me.

Ya'll come back now,
-pate


Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project



[1] Please see  <http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=ToDoMARC>.

[2] If you're interested in translating these notes, please contact me
and I'll get you a draft copy early, then send you the final the day
before I send it out generally.  I ask that you do two things in
return, post the translation to any suitable mailing list or web site in your
native language, and please send me a copy for archiving at my website
<http://pate.eylerfamily.org>.

[3] subscribe at <http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=16466>

[4] You can subscribe by sending an email to
<kohabiz-subscribe at eylerfamily.org> and following the directions you receive.

[5] <www.katipo.co.nz>