[Koha] Koha as a local authors catalog: TEST SITE

[King, Fred]

Esteemed colleagues,

(Please excuse all the capital letters in my message--they're there to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that this is ONLY A BETA PROJECT at the moment.)

At KohaCon 2013 in Reno, I gave a presentation on modifying Koha to serve as a local authors catalog. My presentation was hampered by (1) the Koha server being behind my institution's firewall so I couldn't do a live demo, and (b) I had designed my slideshow the day before during my lunch break since I was giving my presentation in place of someone who couldn't make it.

Three years went by. I learned more and more about Koha. I even took a class in Linux system administration. Then earlier this year I started working on Version 2, and this time I've gotten it right. Well, more so than the previous one. I added a few MARC fields and tags here and there, redesigned some to make more sense, and redesigned the structure to make it more accommodating to different institutions and departments within our system.

I'm going to be giving a presentation at this year's Koha US conference in Monterey next month, and I'd like to give conference-goers and anybody else interested a preview of my catalog. It's still a TEST SITE, and it DOES NOT OFFICIALLY REPRESENT MY INSTITUTION, or anybody connected with it.

So what is it, and what did I do to Koha?

I work in a hospital library, and the doctors, nurses, residents, and other associates who work here write articles, give presentations, etc. Our library has tracked publications for years, but after we migrated to Koha I decided to try putting our HTML lists of citations into something more searchable. Most of the works our staff produce are indexed in Medline. I took Medline records, converted them to MARC, and uploaded them to an instance of Koha that I had modified to account for the new or modified field tags. There's more to it than that, but I have to save *something* for the conference, don't I? After all, I have 45 minutes to fill.

I am delighted to say that this UNOFFICIAL TEST SITE which is NOT OFFICIALLY AFFILIATED WITH MY INSTITUTION OR ANYBODY ELSE ANYWHERE is available for PREVIEW at
   http://www.philobiblios.info
It's running on one of Digital Ocean's smallest configurations (one processor, 20GB SSD, 512MB RAM), so if a lot of people are looking at it, it may be kind of slow. If it crashes, I'll try moving it to one of their more robust configurations.

Comments are welcome, of course--that's why I'm telling you about this UNOFFICIAL TEST SITE before the conference and before it's official. Send comments to authcat (at) philobiblios (dot) us. (Yes, the web site ends in .info, the e-mail address ends in .us.)

Do you think I put in enough disclaimers?

Fred King
Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center
fred.king at medstar.net<mailto:fred.king at medstar.net>
202-877-6670
ORCID 0000-0001-5266-0279

Radio is better than television because the pictures are better.
--Anon



MedStar Health is a not-for-profit, integrated healthcare delivery system, the largest in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region. Nationally recognized for clinical quality in heart, orthopaedics, cancer and GI. IMPORTANT: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain information that is private, confidential, or protected by attorney-client or other privilege. If you received this e-mail in error, please delete it from your system without copying it and notify sender by reply e-mail, so that our records can be corrected. Thank you. Help conserve valuable resources - only print this email if necessary.