[Koha] Koha in a Special Collections Library

[Fred King]

[I started to send this directly to Thomas Green, but decided to send it to 
the list as well, since it might be of use to some folks. My apologies if it 
isn't.] 

First, sorry for the delay in responding. I've been multitasking at the very 
limits of my capacity for the past few days. :-) 

I started looking at Koha last summer as a possible replacement for the 
medical library where I work, and then I got interested in using it for a 
couple of my own projects. First, when I'm not doing medical library stuff, 
I take my photographs around to craft shows, where I sell enough to make it 
interesting, though not enough to quit my day job. I'm working on designing 
a Koha catalog of my photographs, complete with subject headings, so I can, 
for example, put in "cherry trees" and get all the cherry tree pictures. (I 
live in the Washington, DC, area, so cherry tree pictures are very popular.) 
So far, I've designed the MARC structure and the biblio entry forms to 
accommodate photographs, and now I have to put the data in. There are 
probably better photo database programs, but this is mostly a way to teach 
myself Koha. 

Second, I've been cataloging my own book collection since about 1992, and 
the next project is to transfer it from MS Access to Koha. That one is still 
in the "one of these days I want to do it" stage. It's not exactly a special 
collection, but I am going to have to design some specialized MARC fields 
for some of the information. 

If there's any interest in how I'm doing either, I'd be happy to write up my 
experiences and add them to the Koha documentation. They're both kind of 
strange projects, but someone might get some use out of them, and I'd like 
to be able to contribute to the Koha project in some way. I don't know when 
I'll be finished, though. 

I started out with the 2.2.9 VMWare version, which I highly recommend to 
practice on. All you have to do is install the VMWare player, open the 
image, get the IP address using ifconfig, and you're ready to go. The best 
part is that when you make an absolute mess of things, you can just wipe out 
the VMWare image and start over. (Completely over, that is, from the very 
beginning, but I tended to make an absolute mess before I had gotten very 
far, so I hadn't invested a lot of time in it.) You can also save an image, 
make a copy, and make a mess of *that* one. You'll lose some things, but not 
everything. 

Right now, I'm using the Windows version, mainly because I'm more familiar 
with Windows than Linux, and the Windows version works better as a 
standalone system on my (Windows) laptop. YMMV. 

Hope this helps, 

Fred King
phred at philobiblios.net 

Thomas Green writes: 

> Hello All, 
> 
> I am looking for some generic information on Koha. I am interested in
> using Koha in a special collections library environment which
> potentially has different needs than those of a more traditional
> library. I am wondering if anyone here has any advice or suggestions
> for using Koha in this type of environment. If you have implemented
> Koha in a special collections library, what were the challenges? Would
> you recommend using Koha for this? Perhaps this is not the correct
> forum for this question. If not, perhaps someone could direct me to
> the proper place. 
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Tom
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