[Koha] Hello from Vermont

[Mark Alexander]

Hi all,

I'm a retired software geek, now living in a small town in Vermont
after many years in Silicon Valley.  I've been using Linux on my own
computers for 20 years, and have hacked on everything from microkernels
in assembly language to web apps in Ruby on Rails.

I also spent a year in NZ as a child and still consider it as my first
home, and miss it very much, though I've not been back since.  It's
cool to see such great open source software originating from my old
homeland.

Our town library currently uses proprietary software from Mandarin,
but I've been investigating what it would take to convert to Koha.
Many libraries here in Vermont are in a consortium that is using Koha
hosted by a commercial vendor.  But the consortium is closed to
new members.

So to see what it would take for us to build our own Koha installation
from scratch, I installed 16.05 (using git) in an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual
machine and have started to play around with it.  I've exported our
catalog (about 22K items) from Mandarin into a MARC dump.  Now I'm
figuring out what I need to do to import these records and correctly
set things like the item call number and item type.  I may ask some
questions later if I get stuck.

--Mark