[Koha] Fwd: Koha questions!

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!


>         My supervisor asked me to look at Koha and compare its
> features with our current ILS (Voyager).   We had seen a support

> company's version of Koha a few years back and I started using this
> company's version for the comparison.  Are support company versions of
> Koha part of the Koha open source community?  How different is LibLime
> Koha from other open source Koha?


    PTFS/LibLime is running a fork. It is substantially different from Koha. Referring to their fork as open source is being very generous. 

    I think most of the other demo versions are fair representations of the product. Several vendors choose to have master up as their demo, so it's useful for me on the rare occasions when I edit my Newbie Guide. Master means you're seeing the latest stuff. (You prolly knew that since Marist folks are not stupid, but hey putting it out there.) But wait, there's more!

http://koha-community.org/demo/

    So in the unlikely event that one of our super cool demos is down, another is prolly up.


>         How many libraries use Koha currently?  How many academic
> institutions?   Are most Koha sites hosted?  Are any academic
> institutions maintaining their own open source Koha and working with
> the Koha community?


    This is tough to answer since no one *has* to register Koha. I think I can safely say a lot in response to the first question. XD

Here's a page:

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_Users_Worldwide

Here's another:

http://www.librarytechnology.org/map.pl?ILS=Koha

    I would say that yes, most Koha sites are hosted at this stage of the game. There are still a number of independents out there, but as the complexity of setup increases, more folks seem to be trending towards having a vendor help em out. This is anecdotal.

    When last I checked, many academics had the wherewithal to run as independents and the feeling I get from pretty much all academic folks I've run into is that they love to give back to the Community. It makes sense to me that academics are holdouts on the independent side of things since many Universities have their own Computer Science departments that can lend a hand on development (automatic student project ftw) and some of the larger Libraries have plenty of internal IT staff to dedicate to cool stuff.


>         Is there a list of features Koha offers, compared to traditional ILS?


    That sounds like summat another consultant might have handy. If you don't get a response, I'll update my handy dandy table for ye and send it over in the next couple weeks.

    I just want to add that I think you in particular can see lots of cool stuff were someone to mash the polls to the catalogue.

Cheers,
Brooke