[Koha] the signature msg on Koha on Mandrake 10 ...

[Baljkas Family]

Tuesday, September 7, 2004   16:52 CDT

Hi, James,

Lord knows, I don't have answers to your technical question --
> Something to do with Group and User settings on httpd.conf? Or (more likely) 
> it's somewhere else, like that other message I read about moving the perl 
> files to a path in @INC, though I don't know where that is; heck, I don't 
> even know a thing about PERL. 
> 
> BTW I upgraded to koha 2.0.1 a few days after I posted my message. Still gives 
> the same error though.

-- but for this part of your (reasonable) confusion --

> a BLIS student wondering why his university library is in the process of 
> building its own Java-based ILS instead of considering existing open-source 
> ILS like this one *sigh*

-- I have 3 guesses.

When I was an undergrad, the smaller university I went to had a choice of adopting the ILS of the larger local provincial university, but with ridiculous costs and various very strange stipulations (I had a friend who was a reference librarian, else I wouldn't have known). Sometimes there are political forces behind things that we mere mortals will never know or understand. With library-training under my belt now, I still can't understand their paranoid insistence on certain points, nor their grandiose ideas of what should have been paid.

Another guess: your university might have a policy against free software that is meant to protect proprietary data that it generates, university systems (it's hard to sue someone for damages if they didn't charge you anything for what you got and you had to accept it as is), etc. This would be moot if your university library were doing the programming itself. To me and I am sure you and others, it would seem more reasonable just to amend that policy to allow use of open source stuff (I am sure it is already happening) but ...

A third and final guess: there could be a policy above the library-level administration that ties their hands. The chief librarian at the military library I worked at on contract as an assistant cataloguer was preparing for migration to another ILS, but she couldn't even consider things like Koha because they won't fit on the standard RFP form that she would have to fill out. And Lord knows, asking the upper-ups to modify a sacred standard form or allow more blanks than is usual just doesn't fly.

Ah, bureaucracies: making the world just a little bit weirder every day.

Hope you get some answers to your technical question now, too, James.

Cheers,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada