[Koha] Koha@Buffalo continues

[Christopher Brown-Syed]

Greetings one and all. 

This past January, we began using Koha to catalogue two special
collections in the State University of New York at Buffalo. We have run
practicums for Master's students in library studies, with the intention
of providing access to a unique colledtion of books and archaeological
field notes housed in the Classics Department,involving about six
volunteers. The students were impressed enough to set up a discussion
for their colleagues in April. This project will continue in September.
A second project involves the university's teaching and learning
collection of materials to support instructors. 

Chien-Lin Liu, the UB Koha guru, has produced a custom Web interface
which allows access to these collections, and provides a feedback
bulletin board to collect student experiences and suggestions. We have
not finished analyzing these, but will post summaries when available.

Our ongoing use of Koha in the classroom continued during the first
Summer session here in the University at Buffalo. About 17 students in a
course on UNIX/Linux systems administration mounted Koha servers as part
of their six-week course. 

One suggestion which arose from both of these experiences was that a
more typical MARC table be included in the generic Koha parameters. A
"cheat sheet" of "most frequently used" MARC tags was procured from the
campus libraries, and we would be happy to share the specs.For instance,
the publisher field designations currently include only the date ($c),
not the place and publisher fields of the MARC 260 tag. This is
confusing for newbies to MARC. The Library of Congress does publish a
compact MARC brochure for about $10, but we think it might help to turn
on the most frequently used tags and subfields from the get-go. 

At any rate, we now have a couple of dozen newly-minted open-source
enthusiasts here - about six cataloguers and about seventeen budding
sysadmins.I'm allowing for one or two who might not yet be convinced. :)

--
Christopher Brown-Syed, PhD, Editor, Library and Archival Security.
University at Buffalo School of Informatics <clb24 at buffalo.edu>