Open Source Overview
Overview of Open Source:
There are a lot of metaphors for Open Source. One of the most frequently used metaphors is a car metaphor. I've decided to use something nearer and dearer to Library Scientists. Food.
Suppose you went out for a slice of pizza. Let's pretend that when you got to the pizzaria, the front part for the customers was divided in half by a glass partition. Part of the store sold just plain cheese pizza, and this is hard to believe, but the other part of the store was giving away any kind of pizza you wanted.
If you went up to the counter with the cheese pizza and requested any toppings, they'd frown at you and tell you that they either couldn't put pepperoni on your pizza since that would deviate from the normal way that they made their pizza or that it was simply too expensive to add that ingredient, even if you offered to pay for it. If you requested the receipt so that you could make your own pizza at home the way you wanted it, the jockey would get mortally offended and claim that it was a family secret. He wasn't very friendly, and his pizza wasn't free, so he was only catering to people in a rush that weren't too choosy. It was enough to keep him in business, but just barely. If you watched carefully, you could almost swear that he knicked rounds of dough and ladles of pizza sauce from the guy down the counter.
The other half of the store seemed like a fairy tale, but there was that glass partition separating the two eating areas, so customers were hampered getting to the giveaway pizza initially. In the beginning, only very mechanically inclined folks (okay, okay dorks) could get themselves to the other side. Once you watched enough people at it, you copped on to the trick that would lift the glass and lead to free pizza. Better still, once you tasted the new pizza, it was fabulous. The pie jockey was nice, too, even if he was a little eccentric. This side's jockey would tell you that if something you requested wasn't ready, you could wait for him to catch up and that he would fix it for you. If you persisted and offered to pay extra, he'd give your pizza top priority. If you raved about its taste, the jockey would give you the receipt to enjoy at home and alter to your tastes. He even let you take away enough pizza to feed your soccer team if you wanted to. This guy was so nice that he was acquiring a small army. Volunteers would arrive to help where they might - some made dough, some sliced ingredients, some even decorated his side of the business. The richer customers paid for a bit of the electric bill. In all, all of these contributions saved this jockey from going under, and if you watched this side of things carefully, he appeared to be thriving.
Hosting at Hinsdale:
I still remember my first nervous phone call to Stephen Hedges, who was then running Koha at Nelsonville. I was relying on a Librarian to tell me the truth about the product. He was kind enough to welcome a ring after a bit of email back and forth. He soothingly told me that his system had never gone down unexpectedly, which I found terribly hard to believe after dealing with commercial products. However, I took away such a great feeling about Koha that I decided it was well worth approaching my Board after testing it out at home.
We were incredibly experimental and risky. As pioneers, we really put ourselves out on a limb, which I warned my Board about. I leaned on my husband's vastly superior technical expertise to get our server up and running, but I selected the components for the server myself. If you're thinking about hosting your own solution, which I would discourage you from doing now that MassCat is hosting a shared solution, you'll want a custom box.
Now that those are out of the way, I believe that Koha has progressed to the point where set up is much less difficult than it was when I set my own box up. Even with seriously occasional at the mercy of my spouse maintenance, Koha just didn't require too much time for maintenance.
My server was down twice, neither failure could be attributed to the software. Once was when my roommate brutally unplugged the server to charge his mobile. The second occasion was when the power supply overheated and became seriously unhappy with the world, deciding ultimately that self immolation was the way to go. I was certain my data and motherboard were toast. Remarkably that was not so.
Since I'm sure that you're all probably thinking "Get on with it!" but being Librarians are too polite to voice such a sentiment, I shall oblige.
There are two main divisions you'll get used to dealing with; the OPAC and the Librarian's interface. The OPAC is truly self explanatory for a Librarian, so I'll not waste too much of our collective time on it. I will say that lazier is better. Since Koha was manufactured by computer geeks, the keyword search is awesome. It ranks very well and it loots the MARC. The whole MARC. All of those agonising notes you added have a purpose now. ☺
The weakest part of the product is the cataloguing interface. Everyone knows this, and the project is dedicating a lot of time to improve how things feel. Last summer, there was a Google summer of code project just for cataloguing.
I'll show you a few functions now and then hand you off to Nora in an effort to conserve enough time for you to ask questions later.