Time Nick Message
13:45 owen Good morning dedicated Koha factory workers union
13:46 paul_p hello owen
13:47 owen For you, paul_p, a Good Day.
13:48 hdl hi.
13:49 hdl owen... Why today especially ?
13:50 owen I'm giving a "Good Day" because your morning is now out of my control.
13:56 paul_p owen: :D
14:02 hdl lol
14:02 hdl hi gmcharlt
14:02 gmcharlt hi hdl
14:03 paul_p hi gmcharlt
14:03 gmcharlt hi paul_p & #koha
21:46 SelfishMan Has anyone migrated from Athena to Koha?
21:56 kados SelfishMan: yep, lots of libraries have done that
21:56 SelfishMan Any tips before I screw it up the first time?
21:57 kados SelfishMan: I believe West Liberty Public was an Athena library: www.wlpl.org
21:57 gmcharlt__ general tip: for any data migration, plan on having at least one test run before you do it for real
21:57 kados SelfishMan: hmmm, I've actually done a few of those athena migrations, I think it was pretty easy IIRC
21:57 kados SelfishMan: (/me works at LibLime)
21:57 SelfishMan Oh trust me, I'm going to do the migration a dozen times before I concern doing the production one
21:57 kados SelfishMan: the most complicated part is mapping your items
21:58 kados athena represents items in 852 and Koha does it in 952
21:58 kados so you might want to use something like MarcEdit to re-map those item fields
21:58 kados oh, there was something funky about the non-bib data too if I recall correctly
21:58 SelfishMan We've had concerns with exporting the data from Athena so the board has been reluctant to move away. With the acquisition by Follet they are looking to run away as quick as possible
21:58 kados it's in a strange format
21:59 SelfishMan Interesting. I appreciate the info
21:59 kados SelfishMan: if the board is hesitant it might be worthwhile to check out some of the professional services offered by Koha companies
21:59 kados http://koha.org/support/pay.html
22:00 kados some of the Koha companies have done literally dozens of Athena migrations ;-)
22:00 gmcharlt SelfishMan: if I remember correctly, Athena's database files are of a standard sort (FileMaker? not sure) that can be linked to and access using MS Access
22:00 gmcharlt so that would be one way to get at the data
22:00 SelfishMan kados: They were hesitant because of the hassle of migrating from Follet to Athena years ago but now they just want to get away from it and Koha is the preferred option
22:01 kados SelfishMan: gotcha
22:01 SelfishMan I have no doubt they will be willing to pay for the migration but I personally want to learn it inside and out as I hope to become an active member of the Koha community
22:02 gmcharlt SelfishMan: excellent idea!
22:02 kados SelfishMan: good to hear!
22:02 kados SelfishMan: in that case, welcome to the community :-)
22:04 SelfishMan A year ago (almost to the day) I asked the director about her feelings on open source and she was reluctant mostly because she wasn't familiar with any of it. After migrating all our public access computers to Ubuntu and the patrons were *happier* she warmed up to it quite a bit and the board loved the reduced cost of licensing and maintenance.
22:05 gmcharlt Ubuntu as a gateway drug - very nice
22:05 SelfishMan Several months ago a neighboring library migrated to Koha and now I have a chance at getting away from this unstable system we currently have
22:05 SelfishMan I have nothing against Windows but it wasn't secure enough for what we needed without spending a few thousand every year on licenses.
01:04 mason this is worthy of a read...
01:04 mason http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html
01:11 gmcharlt mason: yikes!
02:14 Jo Hi there.
02:14 Jo Wondered if anyone could throw a word of confirmation my way regarding MARC bibliographic frameworks in a new koha 3.0 install
02:15 Jo can I ignore this part of the set up, and will Koha still 'work'.
02:15 Jo I gues I am asking, will the default install have a built in framework?
02:16 Jo (I am a marc virgin ... its going to be a big learning curve before I can create one)
02:16 mason heya
02:16 Jo Hey Mason
02:16 mason choose marc21
02:16 Jo yep - did that
02:16 mason aka USMARC?
02:16 mason good
02:16 mason a default one gets created..
02:16 Jo brilliant.
02:17 mason i'll be about for the next few hours , so ask away ;)
02:17 Jo so that whole catalogue section on the setup screen: http://hltkoha3.katipo.co.nz:8080/cgi-bin/koha/admin/biblio_framework.pl
02:17 Jo can I ignore that area and just accept the defualts
02:18 Jo you probably can't see that ...
02:18 mason yes, i cant
02:18 Jo home\administration
02:19 Jo shall i quietly send you my login and password to my test site
02:20 mason i just PM'ed u
02:22 mason ta
02:22 mason i dont rememeber a 'cat section' on the setup screen
02:23 mason aah
02:23 Jo on the left: http://hltkoha3.katipo.co.nz:8080/cgi-bin/koha/admin/z3950servers.pl
02:23 mason yes, you can ignore all that the test a basic install....
02:23 Jo great!
02:24 Jo and i see a z39.50 server comes by default too
02:24 Jo thanks Mason
02:24 mason bu* , u will want to look at those later ,
02:25 Jo yep
02:25 Jo would be nice if there was a set of basic frameworks for different media formats to use as a starting point.
02:25 mason there are already
02:26 Jo ok - cool. where? I was just going tostart trawling through the koha list
02:26 mason looks like u didnt install them
02:26 Jo I got Katipo to install for me.
02:26 mason was an 'optional' option during the web-install
02:26 mason ok, no biggie...
02:27 Jo So, would you be able to install them for me (as a charge up client of course!)
02:27 mason yeah, its a quicky..
02:27 Jo (sounds like I'm going to as much help as I can get..!)
02:29 mason if its a new install, prolly quicker to do the install again, with the 'optional' stuff included...
02:29 Jo NO!
02:29 mason but.. either/or
02:29 mason ok ;)
02:29 Jo you can't - I have spent days on this ....
02:29 Jo huge big learning curve ....
02:30 Jo (although having done the learning it should be a lot easier 2nd time around)
02:33 mason just mailed u some example frameworks...
02:33 Jo thanks heaps.
02:34 mason historically, the frameworks are something clients want to modify for their own cataloguers
02:34 Jo yep - and I ams ure we will want too as well.
02:35 mason and the mod usually involves removing all the un-needed fields
02:35 Jo thanks for that heads up.
02:35 mason so you end up with a nice stripped-down framework, that hopefully fits on 1 page
02:35 Jo I'll work through them.
02:36 mason which makes life better for the catalogers
02:36 Jo hey Mason, I have a screen shot
02:37 Jo so i can see what kinds of frameworks are there
02:37 mason and speds up the loading time too, i guess...
02:37 Jo but none of the detail - am i missing something?
02:37 Jo 2 pngs
02:39 mason just mailed u login details..
02:40 mason feel free to have a poke about.
02:40 Jo Thanks heaps Mason.
02:41 Jo (wanders off to read...)
04:17 chris atz: joann has been using til reconciliation every day since jan 3 2000, so while it may be buggy, it wouldnt call it limited use ;)
04:18 atz i mean that she is in one library with one workflow
04:18 atz i end up fielding support requests from many different libraries on fines
04:19 chris theres no doubt it needs work
04:19 atz for example, do they use "writeoff" payment types? do they charge fines for ILL items returned not at home library?
04:20 chris yes they do use writeoffs
04:20 chris no to ILL
04:20 chris fines
04:20 chris HLT are just feeling scared, because each upgrade they lose features
04:20 atz then don't upgrade
04:21 chris heh
04:21 chris they gain features too
04:21 atz HLT *should* lose features! Their shit was hardcoded!
04:21 chris nice
04:22 chris thats a great attitude you have there
04:22 atz i'm kidding...
04:22 atz and i see where they are coming from
04:23 atz but they did have a lot of code that was *only* useful for HLT committed to the repo
04:23 chris you are totally right about the fines, it needs to be fixed
04:23 chris the main one they lost was the ability not to have to use marc
04:23 atz yeah, i haven't heard any pushback on that until now
04:23 chris but that was before liblime existed
04:24 atz when did it get phased out?
04:25 chris basically when the marc support was added
04:25 chris so 2.0.x
04:25 atz heh... yeah, "when it became an ILS"
04:25 chris when it became as broken as all the other ILS's :)
04:25 atz yeah, tell me about it. i have encoding issues like crazy now.
04:26 chris this class work should help tho
04:26 atz try getting lithuanian in marc21.
04:26 chris we should be able to abstract a NOMARC view easy(ish)
04:27 chris i mean you could do it now with xslt
04:27 chris and some work on the cataloguing side
04:27 atz yeah, i guess I don't see where they are coming from being fixated on "nomarc"
04:27 atz if the cataloging interface is clean enough, who cares?
04:27 chris they dont care how its stored in the back, they just dont wait to have to see it
04:27 chris wait= want
04:28 chris whcih is probably the case for most special/corporate libraries
04:28 atz so they would be satisfied with simplified "easy" cataloging interface?
04:28 chris hlt do have library school graduates who know marc .. but lots of libraries dont
04:29 chris pretty much
04:29 atz sure... some of my old k-12 librarians didn't even know how to use a mouse
04:29 chris eg www.opus.co.nz
04:30 chris run koha
04:30 atz So they are thinking, i put the author, title and isbn and I'm done?
04:30 chris and they catalogue mostly self written engineering reports
04:30 chris they probably want subjects too
04:30 chris and abstract
04:30 chris but not much more than that
04:30 atz can't that be accomplished now with a custom framework?
04:31 chris almost
04:31 chris if we had a custom framework
04:31 chris that because the default, if you had nomarc switched on
04:31 chris i reckon that would pretty much do it
04:32 atz rather, allow any framework to be specified as the default
04:32 atz including this custom one
04:32 chris yeah that'd work
04:32 chris and if it still made valid marc records in the back
04:32 atz (i think that may be possible already)
04:33 chris that would be even cooler
04:33 chris (or as valid as marc ever gets)
04:33 atz right
04:34 chris the other feature they lost, was the ability to reserve all manifestations of a work in one screen
04:34 chris but that looks to be coming back
04:34 chris with acmoores rfc
04:35 chris the holdings or summarys one
04:36 chris so that will be cool
04:36 atz yeah, holds is going to get reworked several times in the next year
04:36 chris thats the main suck point of current ILS's
04:36 atz everybody has such divergent requirements for holds
04:36 chris yeah
04:36 chris i wonder if we need to do 'profiles'
04:37 chris like a superset of preferences
04:37 chris corporate library profile, choose that, and it presets a bunch of system prefs for you
04:37 chris consortia profile etc
04:38 atz i've been putting of re-orienting the syspref tab hashes to be mutliple-depth
04:38 atz instead of $hash{variable}=tab;
04:38 chris ahh right
04:39 atz but that would be in the same line
04:39 chris right, i probably should start heading home, and you should probably be asleep :-)
04:39 atz just finished a late round of cooking....
04:40 atz chilling out w/ a sleepy kitten on my lap annoyed at my typing
04:40 chris hehe
04:40 atz ttyl
04:41 chris cya later
05:01 anasha I am planning to start localized Indian Kaha user group
05:02 anasha a Localized Indian Community for KOHA!
05:03 anasha as koha users number is increasing everyday
05:04 anasha kados, mason
05:05 mason hiya anasha
05:05 mason whats up?
05:06 anasha i am fine hows you
05:06 anasha how about if i start a koha india user group
05:07 mason very good here too!
05:07 anasha the idea is to provide then support locally
05:07 mason its summer and the weather is nice, lots of frisbee ;)
05:07 anasha we will conducting free training and workshop
05:08 anasha are you a bot?
05:08 mason nah, im a real human
05:08 anasha ook
05:08 anasha ;)
05:09 anasha how my idea
05:09 mason but i play one on the 1nt3rn3t ;)
05:09 mason sounds like a great idea anasha
05:09 mason you close to mumbai?
05:10 anasha yes I am in mumbai, and i have offices in all major cities in india
05:10 mason perfect!
05:11 anasha i have very close ties with Indian Library Association here
05:12 mason we are planning the same thing in new zealand
05:13 mason it will be good to swap ideas and experiences ;)
05:13 anasha we will be getting some help from government of india to Penetrate koha in all mejor universities and colleges india
05:15 anasha and the idea is to connect them all together so that a aptron can move from one library to another with same priviliges which he/she has with his/her library
05:17 mason hmm, perhaps koha's ldap would be good for that....
05:17 mason a very nice idea, too
05:18 anasha yes
05:18 anasha we are working on it
05:18 anasha and will need your help very often
05:19 mason local 'koha-india' mailing-lists could be helpful for you
05:19 anasha yes
05:19 anasha kohaindia.org and kohaindia.com i got registerd recently
05:19 mason cool
05:20 mason sounds like its all-go over there
05:20 anasha ;)
05:20 mason ok, back to work for me...
05:21 anasha ok
05:21 mason lets keep in touch
05:21 anasha yes sure
05:21 anasha can i have your handphone no
05:22 mason i think amit has been doing some ldap stuff recently, too
05:22 mason sure, i'll email it to you
05:22 anasha it was i doing at my place
05:23 mason ah, gotcha
05:23 anasha he worked with me for a month so
05:23 mason lol, nice one ;)
05:23 mason sure sure
05:23 anasha but things couldn't worked out well
05:24 mason how is mumbai now, is it safe?
05:24 anasha yes it is
05:25 mason ok, good to hear this news
05:25 mason and the koha-india new too
05:26 anasha thanks
05:26 mason chat you later
05:26 anasha ok
05:44 hdl anasha: around ?
05:44 anasha hdl: yes?
05:45 hdl I thought you didnot know amit.
05:45 anasha i know him
05:46 anasha is there there anything specific ?