[Koha] Introducing "Mana" (central DB project)

[Paul Poulain]

Some months ago I sent an email to koha-devel, to announce that BibLibre 
was planning to work on a new project, dedicated to sharing informations 
between Koha 
(https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/SharingDatasBetweenKohas_rfc).

I'm proud an happy to give you feedback about this project: things are 
moving quickly & nicely.

  * *Morgane*, our intern -alex_a being the tutor) is doing a great job 
(you can congratulate her on #koha ;-) )
  * we've named this project "*Mana*". It's a Maori word (once again 
:D), easy to pronounce & write. 
http://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?&keywords=mana : "*(verb)* to be 
legal, effectual, binding, authoritative, valid." I'll ask for 
mana.koha-community.org DNS entry soon !
  * as announced by Morgane, we're using the same framework as for HEA 
for the server side. The code is available on our git: 
http://git.biblibre.com/biblibre/koha-mana (will be pushed later on 
git.koha-community.org). The DB is here, some webservice are already 
here & working.
  * The koha-side is being worked, below are some screen shots.
  * we changed some things compared to my initial RFC. Everything is on 
trello, splitted into cards (https://trello.com/b/BslL6i9p/mana-biblibre 
trello not public, claire, the owner is not here today, we'll change the 
status in a day or 2.) Note that there can be some French on trello, 
even if Morgane avoid it.
We plan to have MANA working at the end of august, at least for 
subscriptions (pattern & numbering) sharing. Maybe also for SQL reports 
& vendors.

Some screen shots & features descriptions:

  in subscription management, you can now *share* a subscription 
pattern, by sending it to Mana:

When you click on "share", after validation, you get a *feedback*:



Anyone can then retrieve the numbering pattern & frequency calculation 
when creating a subscription (work being done this week). After the 1st 
screen of subscription creation, Koha will automatically query mana and 
check if there is some data available:


The librarian will then be able to see what is available and get it 
locally in one click.
Every time a librarian "get it locally", a counter will be incremented 
on Mana. Thus, if more than 1 frequency/pattern is submitted for a given 
title, the librarians should be able to see which one is "preferred" by 
other librarians.

Additional features:
  * we will create a script that will help populate Mana from a CSV. We 
will probably issue a RFF ("Request For File" ;-) ) later. Our idea is 
that we want to launch Mana with many data already available.
  * comment. Any librarian will be able to add a comment to a shared 
data, as well as marking it as "obsolete".
  * a syspref will be added to deactivate Mana (will be ON by default)

Feel free to ask for more informations, I would be happy to answer !

-- 
Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
BibLibre, Services en logiciels libres pour les bibliothèques
BibLibre, Open Source software and services for libraries