[Koha] Questions about using Koha in our primary school

[georgejenner at belgacom.net]

Hello there

I'm going to start with one long message.  I've been through the archives and need to talk to you all.

My child's primary school has been split into two campuses, and we've lost the library entirely.  And there is no budget for a new library for several years.  Open 
source and freeware look even better when you have no money :-)

So some parents have volunteered to make a library.  A computer has been donated, and the collection will be started from donated books.  The committee have 
also received good advice from another local school : be very wary of parents offering help with computers.  That's me :-)

The main question is one you must receive frequently.  Does platform independence really include Windows?  The computer has been purchased and I assume it 
came with Win XP (I haven't seen it yet).  I don't think I could convince them to use Linux, even if I had a clue about it myself.  In any case, I want to test out and 
demonstrate Koha using my laptop which runs Win ME.  I see from the installation notes that it has been installed on NT and Win 2000 with considerable difficulty.  
Can you tell me how difficult?  I have no knowledge of perl or Apache.  Does that make it pointless trying without years of study?

The next question is about languages.  The OPAC at our school would be presented in at least 5 European languages, including Greek.  The school has 5 language 
sections, plus Irish, but all other languages in the European Union would be represented in the book collection.  So would a multilingual OPAC be difficult to 
produce?

There would possibly be some benefit to Koha from this, and perhaps this could be our contribution to the cause: translations of key documents into all these 
languages.

Next question.  The library will be staffed by volunteer parents with less computer knowledge than even me.  There won't be a trained librarian for at least 3 years.  
Would this present a problem?  Is the system sufficiently simple and robust that we can't get into much trouble?

Next question.  As the collection will be started with donated books, we need to catalog them.  There is a shareware proggy that purports to take an ISBN and then 
search the internet for the book, then places the biblio dat in a database.  It's called Readerware.  It says it even gets the cover art and includes that.  I think that 
having cover art would be really nifty for a primary school library.  So could the OPAC show that.  Is this simply a question of having an image in a field of a MySQL 
database.  And is that possible?

I'll stop there.  If you can give me good news I'll start downloading.  I've got a couple of months to get it going as the school year starts in September in Europe.  As if 
things weren't weird enough.

Thanks for any help
George