[Koha] Is koha suitable for us?

Viktor viktor at valamo.fi
Fri Oct 3 22:54:05 NZST 2003


Greetigns everyone!

Shall I introduce myself,  I am Monk Viktor from Valamo monastery,
Finland. My work is, of course be a monk, but a other hand, I keep up
our IT-department.

Now, I known, there is always several questions, and here is answers of
those questions...;)
Yes, real monk, I coming the monastery at 1987, and we have computers,
about 60 at this time.

Okay, now we can move on a real thing.

Our library, which has about 50000 items, seeking new librarysystem. One
  strong candidate is koha.

I quote some words from our libray brochure...

"The valamo monastery library is a  thelogical research library.  Its 
main topics are Orthodox theology  and monastic traditions. The library 
serves the brotherhood and staff of the monastery, visitors, researchers 
and students.

Collections

The new collection contains about 30000 volumes of  books, periodicals 
and magazines. Beside Orthodox  theology it contains material on other 
religions, science of religion and philosophy of religion. Other 
branches of knowlegde, focus on humanistic and  social sciences. There 
is also a reference section -literature published before 1919 and other 
rare volumes- and a periodicals section.

The old Valamo monastery collection contains  nearly 20000 volumes. 
These books and manuscripts are available for reference use to 
researchers. The old  Valamo collection is written mostly in Old Church 
Slavonic and Russian. It contains a  unique selection of old Russian 
liturgical and ascetical literature. The old Valamo collection is the 
largest collection of Russian  Orthodox literature in Western Europe."

Quote end.

Now, we have old DOS-based system, which is not anymore "enough", 
because we  want put old collection to catalogue, with cyrillic and 
maybe even church slavonic character set.

I am installed and little bit hacked koha 2.0-pre4 and it seems working, 
with UTF-8 character set, at least latin and cyrillic characters.

Is there something else, what I should to known, when using koha with UTF-8?

Monk  Viktor
Valamo Monastery
http://www.valamo.fi






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