[Koha] Venezuela's National Library evaluated, decided to deploy the Koha Integrated Library System

[José Miguel Parrella Romero]

Greetings,

I'd like to share this brief newsflash to all of you, since there's a
big chance BNV could become a large Koha user.

Jose

Venezuela's National Library evaluated, decided to deploy the Koha
Integrated Library System
=======================================================================

On the first half of 2008, Venezuela's National Library (BNV) evaluated
the Koha ILS and other FLOSS-based ILSs, together with a proprietary
ILS, and decided to deploy Koha in two phases for the Library's
catalogue, which includes more than two million records, and the
National Public Library System.

The evaluation was made by the Information Technology Office, and
starting February 2008, three independent Koha consultants were asked
for technical help in order to evaluate Koha strengths and shortcomings,
and possible development/improvement plans, as well as an important
migration plan from the legacy NOTIS system. Circulation, acquisitions
and patrons weren't regarded as critical modules of the ILS, while
Cataloguing, Authorities and Serials were given special attention.

Ailé Filippi and Mariana González, licensed librarians, deployed a full
Koha demonstration and worked for two months with the BNV librarians in
order to establish the desired functionality level. BNV librarians
wanted a new input system for MARC records which allow them to manually
input all fields and subfields, and a very particular notation for
holdings which allows to specify the specific Public Library where the
item is held.

On the other hand, José Miguel Parrella Romero, an IT consultant, worked
with BNV's IT Office in order to recommend and install the latest Koha3
snapshot, and configured a working proof of concept using Zebra for more
than 70 thousand simulated records. BNV staff export data from NOTIS and
use a proprietary tool to convert those records to an ISIS database, so
it was necessary to write a computer program which migrates those
records to MARC.

While the project is currently waiting for further actions, Fernando
Báez, BNVs General Manager, and Sergio Teijero, IT Consultant for BNV,
have exposed BNV intentions to fully deploy the Koha ILS in short term,
migrating over 2 million records and providing access to thousands of
Public Libraries and users around the World who would like to access BNV
catalogue information using Koha3 OPAC, while renewing BNV's IT platform.