This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Dec 2007, by Wisely.
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22 Apr 08
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17 Dec 07
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We’re mostly done with bibliographic input now—we’ve got just over 7,000 items catalogued of about 8,500. Our Patrons are in the database. We could circulate now if we wanted to. We’ve tested the basic features that we need and they work well enough for our purposes. When we started out, we were looking for the barest minimum of functionality. We got a whole lot more than we bargained for.
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Koha is far more reliable than many commercial ILS options. This was certainly a factor with me. It seemed as though things would be down every other month for a few days of unscheduled time with a few of the commercial products I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. Our server has been down twice in about 3 years of testing, with the box running 24/7. Once was when my roommate inadvertently unplugged the server to charge his mobile phone. The second time was a catastrophic hardware failure. The power supply essentially caught fire. I was terribly worried my data was toast. It wasn’t. I had backups, but I didn’t need to use them.
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The Horowhenua Library Trust catalogue can give you a taste of the aesthetics: (http://www.library.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl) The upcoming Version 3 looks quite like the Athens County catalogue: (http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/)
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Cataloguing for a large institution would be tough. Holdings information is a bit bodged at the moment. The cataloguing module is certainly clunky to use. The interface is tabbed with each MARC field getting its own text box. As a result, either a Librarian ends up sticking all of the fields in one tab for a really long screen of many, many boxes, or fields are missed by sloppy cataloguers that don’t switch tabs. It is possible to set up frameworks that anticipate necessary fields for a given material type, but this entails a good deal of planning during setup. The good news in this department is that thanks to Google summer of code, a powerful new tool is being worked on to make things much nicer for cataloguers everywhere, and functionality should be vastly improved with Version 3.
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