[Koha] evaluating Koha

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

Hi there,

I can certainly appreciate the tenuous situation, here are hopefully
some helpful answers :-) :

----- "ils shopping" <ils.shopping at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
> I'm in a library that may soon break away from a consortium. 
> Actually
> it's a certainty but I've been asked to conduct my research quietly.
> I apologize in advance for questions your probably tired of seeing.
No, questions we don't mind at all :-)


> 1)  We currently are on a shared Sirsi Unicorn system with several
> other libraries.  I've been assured that we can export all of the
> data
> from the system administrator.  He is a good guy who I believe will
> extract everything possible.  He tells me that everything including
> old transactions can be exported.  I see there is a Winnebago to Koha
> plugin to aid with that migration.  Is there a simillar plugin or
> instructions on how to perform a migration using Sirsi Unicorn.  If
> not I'm willing to contribute towards that form of project.
Generally, I think folks are afraid to share their ILS-specific migration
toolkits publicly. LibLime's attorneys have recommended that we don't
provide access to them under the terms of an OSS license due to potential
litigation issues ... so it's not likely you'll be able to find this
piece ...

The good news is that you're probably dealing with standard format
exports into MARC21 for the bib and auth data ... and the other
data will likely be available via your reporting module in CSV or
another simple format that's easy to manipulate into a Koha-friendly
format.

Also, I should mention, there are companies that will do all of this
for you: http://koha.org/support/pay.html ... and I know of at least
one that has worked with Unicorn data ;-).

> 2)  Book jackets in the catalog.  My boss truly covets book jackets
> in the library catalog is this possible with run of the mill Koha or
> does it require the LibLime version.  Is this a subscription service.
No! The Amazon.com module has been generally available for about 2 years,
all you have to do is flip the switch in the system preferences and
add your amazon.com developers key and associates tag and the images
start showing up.

> 3)  SIP and NCIP.  Does it?
SIP2 is supported by I think 3 modules ... the most stable one that
will appear in 3.x series is probably the one you want. It should be
committed in the next month or so.

> 4)  Can you import records using Connexion from OCLC or is it
> strictly import by Z39.50?
You can import OCLC records into the reservoir; and with a bit
of customization, you could tweak that import to insert directly
into the database. There is a future feature that will allow you to
set up 'overlays' for types of imports (meaning that you could set it
up to overlay based on the OCLC number or ISBN, etc.).

> 5)  Reports how detailed?  Can you use something like Crystal Reports
> as an interface?
We are just in the testing phases of the new report writer, that'll 
appear shortly. You can always use a report writer like Crystal Reports
or PHPMyAdmin since you've got direct access to the database.

> 6)  SMS, IM, Email, and Mail notices.  Do these capabilitites exist?
There's a SMS gateway that Near East University created, I'm not sure
it's made it into the next version, but it could certainly be slated
for a future version. Chris Cormack developed a basic IM gateway that
could be spruced up for production given some attention. Email and
Mail notices are available currently.

> Probably enough for now in the question department.

Cool, let us know if you have any more.

Sincerely,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS