Koha's Progress
During the past few years of my association with the project, I have been simply alarmed by the exponential pace of development. This is one of the hardest things for a new user to understand since they don't know how truly no frills the original was.
The whole enchilada grew up in New Zealand, or Diet Australia as Stephen Colbert puts it. This made MARC initially unimportant. However, luckily for Western Massachusetts, it made elegance and paucity of code extremely important. There are more sheep than people in that neighbourhood, and that means there are more sheep fences there than here. I know you don't find such an observation either enlightening or informative, but trust me, this bit of trivia is. Chris, the person who could be termed the Original Developer, decided that he simply had to find a way to make transmission of the information possible in the hostile information environment of sheep fences. For you see, those things tick. And that ticking makes data transmission very patchy.
Chris thought, as I had for years and my husband has for years as well, that an ILS is just not that hard to make. Books go in, books come back. It's essentially a grocery store with no regular charges. How hard can it be?
Well, it's actually not until folks pile in and say "You know what would be nice?" I am perhaps the biggest culprit in that department. My transgressions are made much worse by my having a vague idea of how long my suggestions might take. My redeeming qualities, small that they are, are two. First, I'm willing to wait for my proposed changes. (Although for the most part, I've not had to. Changes have been made in hours in some cases.) Second, and much more importantly, I contribute documentation. Everyone in an open source project has something to contribute back, and the thing gets better for it.
Which brings us neatly back to the initial point of this page. I had to find a way to drive home the impact of things in a very condensed fashion.
This was the OPAC for the previous version, which is very similar to the one seen at Hinsdale, though even this is now more advanced.
http://opacdemo.koha-fr.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl
This is the OPAC now
http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/
That's the kind of change you'll see in just a couple of years with this project, and I think it's remarkable.