Time Nick Message 13:19 mn hello 13:19 dewey salut, mn 13:20 mn i'd like to know some things about koha before trying it 14:55 mn especially concerning barcodes 14:57 mn i'd like to have the whole circulation as a self-service-station with a barcodereader 14:57 kados hi mn 14:58 mn hi 14:58 kados mn: LibLime has a separate self-service self checkout module for Koha that's not yet been contributed 14:58 kados and it uses barcodes 14:58 kados so patron scans their barcode, then the barcodes of the items they are checking out 14:59 kados then clicks on 'complete transaction' 14:59 mn exactly what i was thinking about 14:59 mn where is the hook? 14:59 kados it will probably be wrapped into a future version of the public release 14:59 kados but we haven't had enough sponsorship for it to afford that thusfar 15:00 kados it was developed for one client on a strict budget 15:01 mn well i'm not someone to sponsor something. I'm on a strict (read no) budget myself. I do a ~5000 books private lib for around 150 patrons 15:01 kados public library? 15:02 mn no not public 15:03 mn i was inspired by our city library though but they use something comercial 15:03 kados right 15:03 mn it will run on a celeron with 98mb ram 15:04 kados you can run koha on a PDA :-) (I've done it :-)) 15:04 mn really? sounds cool 15:04 kados yea, was a bit of fun I had a few years back :-) 15:05 kados anyway ... 15:05 kados here are some demos: 15:05 kados http://liblime.com/demos 15:05 kados of Koha, if you want to experiment 15:06 kados there are plenty of free support options, including this IRC channel and the mailing list 15:06 kados and there are companies that offer inexpensive support as well 15:06 kados http://koha.org/support/ 15:07 mn great, thank you. How long do you think will it take me to set it up and enter the books? 15:07 kados hard to say 15:08 kados are you going to run on linux? debian? 15:08 kados install and maintain yourself? 15:08 kados do you have basic command-line skils? 15:08 kados understand apache, mysql, etc.? 15:09 kados if so, it should only take a day or two at the most 15:09 kados but if you're also learning all of that stuff, it could take a while 15:09 mn presumably ubuntu. cli proficient. mysql too. but it is always a pain for me to maintain apache 15:10 kados if you want a system up and running immediately, some of the companies offering hosted packages can get your system installed in a few hours 15:10 kados probably not on a sunday though :-) 15:11 mn why could that be? 15:11 mn how do i checkout something without barcodes. Isn't this going to be error-prone? 15:12 kados you need barcodes to check something out 15:12 kados or at least some identifier in place of a barcode 15:12 kados that's unique 15:14 mn so barcodes for the books but not for the users. And your system is for users? 15:19 kados the koha you download from koha.org has two interfaces: 15:20 kados 1. public interface for searching, placing reserves, checking account information 15:20 kados 2. a staff interface for managing patrons, checking out items, adding books to the collection, etc. 15:20 kados liblime has a separate interface that allows: 15:20 kados 3. patrons to use a unique identifier (usually barcode) to check out books to themselves (using another uniquie identifer for the book) 15:21 kados #3 is not in standard koha, it's only available on LibLime's hosted platform 15:21 kados we may eventually contribute it if we find sponsorship for the project 15:23 mn i see ... 15:25 mn and koha can print barcodes for the books? 15:25 kados yep 15:26 mn but not for the patrons? 15:26 kados a previous version could print for both, but that feature isn't currently maintained 15:26 kados printing barcodes is pretty easy 15:26 kados there are plenty of websites that let you do that for free 15:27 kados or you can just buy some pre-printed ones pretty cheaply too 15:27 mn i didn't know that... And will i find compatible barcodereaders in europe? 15:28 kados yep 15:29 kados barcode standards are international 15:29 mn yeah i mean in terms of devicedrivers 15:30 kados ? 15:30 kados not sure I understand your question 15:32 mn well i asume that the barcodereader connets via usb. And then? There has to be some part which brings this into the perl-application that is koha 15:32 kados koha is web based 15:32 kados and a barcode reader is just a keyboard to the computer 15:33 mn So you have to place the cursor in the right field? 15:33 kados there is auto-focus built in 15:34 mn so i can use any barcodereader? Even one with RS232? 15:34 kados yep 15:34 mn cool 15:39 mn if your self-checkout module only works with an online-server it is unusable to me anyway 15:40 kados well, all of Koha is web based 15:41 mn yes but i can install mysql+httpd+perl+firefox on the same machine, right? 15:42 kados yep, if you want to 15:43 mn well for our needs everthing else would be overkill. Althogh backup and the like are going to be a problem 15:51 mn well thanks a lot for answering my nasty questions! It should be quite late now in nz! Thanks a lot and a nice week! 15:52 kados no prob 15:52 kados and btw, I'm based on our US office 15:52 kados ohio in fact :-) 15:53 mn so its more like noon there 15:55 kados 15:00 in fact 15:55 kados and it's early morning in NZ 05:17 toins hello world 05:22 chris hi toins 05:23 toins hello chris 05:23 chris how are things? 05:27 toins chris, good ! 09:07 kados morning #koha 09:09 hdl hi kados 10:45 kados morning owen 10:45 owen Hi kados 10:46 kados so I spent a few hours over the weekend on YUI 10:46 kados it's actually pretty simple to use 10:47 kados I think the hardest thing about the design for 3.0 is gonna be the design part 10:47 kados implementation shouldn't be too hard 10:48 owen Tell me about what you tried with YUI 10:48 kados I played with the following components: 10:48 kados Button 10:48 kados DataTable 10:48 kados Menu 10:48 kados TabView 10:48 kados and ... 10:49 kados there's a general layout one 10:49 kados can't remember what it's called :-) 10:50 kados Grids 10:52 kados actually, of them, I think Grids is probably the one we want to start with 10:52 kados it's so simple to use and works so well 10:52 owen yeah, we talked briefly about that one on Saturday 10:53 kados as I played around it struck me that we're really not that organized about what types of data elements we have 10:53 kados in the intranet 10:53 owen What do you mean? 10:53 kados (probably in the opac too, but I was looking at the intranet) 10:53 kados well for instance, there are global navigation elements 10:54 kados in NPL templates that aren't in default or katipo 10:54 kados and vice versa 10:54 kados and each module presumably has its own set of navigation elements 10:54 kados I was also mentally experimenting with the idea of 'action' vs 'view' 10:55 owen that sounds interesting 10:55 kados so 'change password' or 'delete' is an action 10:55 kados whereas 'Fines' and 'Reserves' are views 10:56 owen Much like we did in the OPAC 10:58 kados yea 10:58 kados something else that's cool about YUI is you can have different behaviors for different elements of the same class 10:58 kados so take tabs for instance 10:58 kados you might have 4 tabs on a detail page 10:58 kados three of them have pre-loaded content 10:58 kados one of them is a link to another page 10:59 kados with YUI, you can make them all behave and look like one set (of course the new page would have to be set up to look the same, etc.)