October 2005 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Tagging in Koha OPAC
by Matti Lassila 05 Oct '05

05 Oct '05

A little feature suggestion to the future version of Koha OPAC: While ago I read a book called The Power to Name by Hope A. Olson. In the book Olson proposes an user contributed classification system in library catalogue as a way to empower people. She critizises the bias found in subject representation found in library catalogues and makes a skectch of a system where users are able to make connections between books and add their own subject headings. And look what we have today - The Library Thing (www.librarything.com) - an online service which enables users to catalogue their own books and add metadata, like tags, to the books, like in del.icio.us or in flickr. Just like Olson imagined. I think that we should add the tagging feature to Koha as soon as possible. Then Koha could be the first tagging-enabled ILS and the publicity would be huge - great PR to the project and to the open source movement overall. There's an open source tagging module Freetag written in PHP (http://www.freetag.org/) . It could serve as a starting point. Best regards, Matti Lassila --------- The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. ---Mark Twain

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Fines Broken
by Joshua Ferraro 05 Oct '05

05 Oct '05

Hi all, I just discovered (much to my dismay) that fines are broken in the 2.2.x and greater series. At first glance, one reason for this is that the categoryitem table has been removed. So this is a good example of the kind of QA problems we're having with this project. It's going to take many hours for someone to hunt back for the history of this issue, find out who broke what when, then figure out how to fix it, then to commit the fix. There's got to be a better way. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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Koha 2.2.4 then 2.2.5 (roadmap)
by Paul POULAIN 04 Oct '05

04 Oct '05

Hi, As discussed before on koha-devel. After asking french libraries, it seems that everybody want Koha 2.2.x branch to be rock solid & accept delaying new features on Koha 3.0 As Release Manager, I think I can decide that Koha 2.2.5 and next version will be only bugfixes. So I decide it ;-) Sometimes, it's complex to decide wether code is bugfix or new feature. For example, one of my customer consider that being unable to reorder subfields in the MARC editor is a bug. It's the 1st one. So, if you have ideas on how to decide wether something is a bugfix or a feature, let me know here ;-) About roadmap : * I'm installing Koha 2.2.4RC2 (internal) at a library. Unless they have problems, 2.2.4 should be here on friday. Maybe next monday. * 2.2.5 will arrive at the 1st bloquing bugfix or in 3 months (the 1st occuring) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Setting warnings ON
by Paul POULAIN 04 Oct '05

04 Oct '05

To set warnings on, just add the following line to your virtual host : SetEnv PERL5OPT -w gives a LOT of warnings now, hunting begins ;-) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Itemtype and MARC21 Quandry
by Joshua Ferraro 02 Oct '05

02 Oct '05

Hi all, So here's a problem. Say a library has a system that allows a single MARC21 record to specify record types within the record in the 852$6 and allows issuing rules to happen on the item level rather than on the record level. I'm not sure if this is valid MARC21 practice, but I do know of at lease one system that works this way. When such a library converts to Koha, only one of the itemtypes is valid for the whole record, meaning that they will lose the ability to define issuing rules at the item level. The only solution seems to be to break up each record into multiple records, one for each itemtype (as a temporary fix). So I'm wondering, should we be defining issuing rules at the item level in Koha 3.0 for MARC21? or should we continue to define them soley on the record level? Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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