[Koha] Comparing Koha

[Mark Tompsett]

Greetings,

To be honest, I am not familiar with using Athena myself, but I do know 
this. My colleagues (in the Philippines) and I migrated our data from our 
old Athena system to Koha successfully. This involved a lot of data clean 
up, because data entry in Athena was not consistently done properly. 
However, the results have been nothing but great for us. I'm the computer 
person involved in maintaining and tweaking our Koha system, and the 
community support on the IRC channel and mailing lists 
(http://koha-community.org/support/free-support/) have been invaluable.

You can read about the functionality of Koha in the documentation online 
(http://koha-community.org/documentation/). I know it has Acquisitions, 
Serials, Circulation, Cataloguing, Reporting, and Manuals (including some 
contextual help as well as online [see previous URL]). I don't know what you 
mean by Supervisor, though there is certainly a user privilege system which 
gives or denies access to various sections of Koha. You don't ask about any 
of the other functionalities that also exist in Koha, so you really should 
read the documentation to which I have given a link to see what wonderful 
things you are missing.

Do not let the lack of ease in data migration be the reason you stay locked 
into a proprietary system. I am sure any one of the paid support providers 
(http://koha-community.org/support/paid-support/) could assist you, if you 
find the task too difficult to do yourself. Koha is not going to disappear 
like Athena or some other proprietary software, and it is only going to 
continually get better, because an active community is constantly working to 
make it better.

I hope these URLs will be useful in your research.

GPML,
Mark Tompsett