Good Day So Far
Well, it's been a good 24 hours, I would say. Last night I introduced a new library catalog system, using the KOHA Free Software library program, to our newly formed librarian staff and the Educational Resource Center committee. Things went very well — KOHA has allowed us to do virtually everything (and in some ways more than) a $1,000 library program for gratis. The system is now running a Mandrake Linux desktop customized to make exactly two programs accessible: KOHA and BibleTime.
I still have a few “battles” before everything is right. For instance, we still need label printing and I somehow need to link a label printing program with KOHA's MySQL backend. I'm hoping to accomplish this with KBarcode, but if that doesn't work, I bookmarked the site of another alternative.
Oh, for the first time in months, Open for Business also got Slashdotted… well, sorta. My current article about Lindows' announcement concerning the SCO-IBM case hasn't been picked up by Slashdot, but some Slashdot reader that liked it posted a comment on the latest Slashdot story on SCO and it has drawn roughly the same number of people as a “real” Slashdotting normally would. Fortunately, my PHP caching system, which dep was kind enough to help me with, is keeping everything running much more efficiently than during my previous encounters with Slashdot.
Well, that's all for now, except that I would like to give a great big “THANK-YOU” to Josiah and Christopher for both promoting my run for the BlogShares BSEC. I never expected anyone to actually do so, so it was a nice surprise. Thanks guys!
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I’m interested in that KOHA thing. Maybe I could manage to get our library away from this awful prog they use for cataloging. It’s miserable and expensive and requires way to many updates. It’s finally stabilized, but at one point we had weekly server crashes, etc. yuck
RE: Good Day So Far
Yikes! Well, you really should check it out. It’s all web based and a snap to setup (relatively speaking). All I needed to do was add a few Perl modules the default MDK install didn’t have (Gentoo perhaps would install ‘em by default?). At any rate, I have it running with a local webserver setup (i.e. the box isn’t on a network atm, although it could be) and it’s much better UI wise than the old Windows arrangement we had.
For example, now when it starts up, it only has two icons (the two programs people are suppose to be able to use), a taskbar, and a Konqueror web browser window that starts up automatically with the catalog search tool already waiting. I used KDE’s built in KDE Kiosk framework to take away the user’s ability to change settings… finally fixing one of my big bugaboos I had previously — I couldn’t get Windows ME completely locked down. sigh
If your expensive library program happens to be “LAMB,” let me know, I wrote a Perl-based filter that snatches the data out of it and puts it into a MySQL dump format.
-Tim
EOS GLAS
Nah, it’s GLAS by EOS http://www.eosintl.com/htdocs/products/glas.asp. I can’t seem to get to the KOHA website. Does it have a feature that builds it’s own website? That would be key. It would also need to be able to import the old database and we’d be concerned about the security potential. Also, we have someone here who was hired with this program in mind so migration might be a resistant path.
RE: Good Day So Far
Hmm… I’m not quite sure why the site isn’t opening. It has a catalog search “site,” if that is what you mean. It’s all written in Perl and it’s installer modifies Apache configs to make its “site” work. You can modify the templates to make it integrate into your existing site if necessary.
It let me choose which ports it is on, so I left port 80 for normal http traffic (not really necessary on this system, but…) and placed the public and admin interfaces on localhost:8000 and localhost:8080 repectively. It runs quite nicely on Apache2.
If you can somehow get the Glas database into a SQL dump, you’ll be all set as far as importing stuff. Our library is rather small (1,500 books), but we still didn’t want to have to re-enter everything. KOHA is meant for very large libraries though, so once you get beyond importing you should be fine — IIRC one large US city just moved its public library over to KOHA (Cleveland, maybe?).
-Tim