Re: [VuFind-Tech] Whats involved in an ILS?

[Markus F. <in...@fl...>]

Hi Elliot

we run a KOHA installation at the moment for our cooperative database 
project, just to create MARC records for Vufind.

http://bibnet.org

http://bibnet.org/vufind/

http://www.bibnet.org:8080/cgi-bin/koha/cataloguing/addbiblio.pl?frameworkcode=AIE

Vufind is great, very clean coded, stable and quick as hell!

KOHA is a total other picture. It's a huge overhead to what we actually 
need. Besides if you run it with Zebra it tends to be very instable and 
changes the contents of the underlying MySQL table in a unpredictable 
way! KOHA contains a _lot_ of bugs (e.g. it messes 008 totally up). And 
it's very bad coded, making it hard to correct stuff. You'll find e.g. 
hunderd of pages containing the same content in every possible language...

...the mailing list of KOHA is not useful too. Every possible librarian 
seems to be suscribed to it, but very few know to code an can really 
help. Even if you send bug fixes to it, they tend to get ignored.

There are several commercial companys for KOHA trying to get some cash 
out of this dreadful situation...

We probably will too program a small application adapted exactly to our 
needs for producing MARC records for journal articles. This is a very 
specialized situation, which is rather easy to code for.

To create a new ILL for any type of media with all the reserves and 
stuff, as you need, might be a little more complex. But yes, the library 
world needs more simple ILLs which are capable to handle MARC!

Wish you luck!
Markus

PS: the KOHA Driver in Vufind doesnot work to my knowledge.



Am 26.09.2010 01:14, schrieb ...:
> We are a small school starting a library in conjunction with another
> local non-profit.  I'm the sole tech guy, or at least the only devoted
> one.  VuFind looks great from a couple demos I've seen so I'm looking at
> it some more.
>
> We are a brand new library, so we have no ILS already.  I've looked at
> oss4lib to see what open source options are available and its pretty
> much evergreen and kohl.  But I am wondering how much of what these
> large programs have really needs to be used by vufind.
>
> I was hoping to write something in python to build marc records of our
> catalog, check books in and out and keep track of library card holders.
> I assume vufind takes care of the searching of the records, given MARC
> records to search through.  Is this true?  The tasks I am thinking my
> program will have to do are not quite trivial, but certainly something
> one intermediate programmer could handle (with some help from friends
> and forums).  Is this realistic?
>
> If not prohibitively difficult, I would like to write the simple ILS
> because our library will also keep track of book donors who have
> "checked books in" for library use, and who will be able to reclaim
> them.  Probably the donor will designate how long the book should be in
> our system before we remind them that they can have it back if they miss
> it.   I am pretty much the only "library staff", and very little
> administrative action need to happen.
>
> Is there any specific information I can look at about what queries
> vufind will make of the ils, and what database management tasks are its job?
>
> thanks,
> Elliot
>
>
>
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