Michael Casale writes
> I am a member of a group reviewing the necessary redevelopment
> (positively) of a small college research library primarily concerned
> with the humanities. I am interested to hear from anyone who has
> had recent experience (good or bad) of open source LMS systems.
I am running the koha open source system. Get koha from
http://koha-community.org, not from http://koha.org.
At my library school, I use koha for my cataloging class. I also
have run a course on ILS installation. I will run this again in the
Spring semester.
The approach I recommend for koha is to set up a server with the
Debian operating system, and then use the koha Debian packages. That
takes about 2 hours to do, for somebody with a bit of Debian
experience.
> The library collection contains material both in Roman and other
> non-Roman scripts so the ability to handle non-Roman fonts is of
> importance.
You probably mean "non-Roman" characters. The ability to
handle fonts is an issue of the client that connects to
the ILS, most likely a web browser.
> I should also add that the current cataloguing situation is not
> very good so it is almost certain that scripts will have to be
> specifically written to convert current data into a recognised
> standard.
Which most likely would be MARC. I suspect this will be a major
issue to start with. There are module for MARC records for Perl,
Python, and I suspect others, but you have to be careful to identify
the original character encoding of the records. This can be tricky
as the result can not be checked without human intervention.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
skype: thomaskrichel
|