[Koha] Koha in Croatia

[Marijana Glavica]

Dear list members,

Here at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia, we decided to use Koha. About the reasons I could write very long story, but for now I just want to share with you my happiness about that fact. And some fears :)

We decided to be very brave so we installed Koha 3.0, and we will be using it very soon, for production. I know it is not recommended for production use yet, but it looks comfortable to me for our needs right now. Some functionality we need right now, other can wait, and also we plan some development on top of Koha (primarily for communication with other systems).

Everything what I seriously need right now, seems to be working in Koha 3.0, except the trouble with subtitles (bug 1621), which is pretty serious to me. 
Also, we wanted to run Koha on Postgres but we didn't get system preferences loaded into the database during installation, so we thought maybe not for now :)

So, first thing I wanted to check with developers - how silly is to use Koha 3.0 for production right now? (by now I mean in about 2 months :). Specifically, do you expect any database changes which would give me a trouble with data in current database? What is with subtitles, will they get separate field in Koha database?
(actually, it is better to call it "reminder of title" because that is the meaning of the 245b field in MARC21, although in UNIMARC you have distinction - 200e for subtitle, 200k for another title, 200d for parallel title)

Second, I want to ask developers to open Croatian translation chapter on Koha translation site (local name: Hrvatski, abbr: hr).
(I see Croatian already listed on About Koha page)

Third, is there are any serious or potential users from Croatia or countries with similar languages already? I would very much like to be in touch with you. 

And finally some words to introduce myself and my dearest and generous friend Dobrica who is helping us during last few years in implementing free software in our libraries. He is very proficient in Perl and also very active in open source community. We developed our current library catalog which is actually search engine, indexer for data in different formats (e.g. native CDS/ISIS format, ISO2709, DBF or Excel) so we are not limited just to data coming from bibliographic database but we search different sources (e.g. list of e-journals coming from publisher) all in one interface. (http://svn.rot13.org/index.cgi/webpac/browse/trunk)

Also, we started to develop conversion tools for very messy data :). About what came out you can read here http://webpac.us/. Please read WebPAC::Manual first and sorry for not having any user documentation, I hope that will change. So, conceptually this is very broad project, tending to be data warehouse and search engine, but for now it is really only the very powerful tool for restructuring data.
You can obtain it here: http://svn.rot13.org/index.cgi/webpac2/browse/trunk
Hope some of these conversion tools may be useful to Koha community, so if I see some interest I will be very happy to help and explain, and that would motivate me to write some user documentation :).

That's for now, hope to be here more. I appreciate your work very much.

Marijana Glavica
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Libraries
I. Lucica 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
http://www.knjiznice.ffzg.hr/