Hello Michelle, I can only answer part of your question, but I'm sending both your question and my reply to the kohalist, where people with eperience in MARC will pick it up, and offer some more answers, I'm sure. Koha is easy for novice cataloguers. As a small public library, we don't need detailed cataloguing for most records, and we do need fast records - we like to get our books on the shelf without delay. So we don't import MARC records any longer. We used to, but gave it up some years back, when we realised it wasn't meeting our needs - too slow and too detailed, and sometimes not appropriate. But I am very well aware that other libraries' priorities are different, and a team of Koha developers has been working on the MARC interface - notably Paul Poulain. I will leave him to comment on your questions about auto-coding. We love Koha. But then it was written to meet our needs, so we would say that, wouldn't we? But I can also say that everyone else here also likes it - and I'm thinking especially of people like volunteers, borrowers, casual users, all of whom find it easy to use. We are particularly proud of Acquisitions, which gives us much better budget control that we ever had in the past. We are just in the process of re-developing our web page (www.library.org.nz), improving the integration with the OPACs and adding functionality for our members to access their own records and renew and reserve from home. Watch out for it towards the end of this month. Cheers, Rosalie Blake Head of Libraries, Horowhenua Library Trust On 31 Oct 2002, at 15:56, Michelle Swanson wrote:
Hi: Is koha easy to use for "novice" catalogers? Does it have a fill in the blanks template with author, title, publisher, etc., which auto-codes marc? Does the cataloger need to be very familiar, somewhat familiar or unfamiliar with marc code? Please advise. Also, please share your personal views on the koha system. I tried out the Koha OPAC at Horowhenua Library Trust via the web and it looks impressive. best regards from,
Michelle Swanson Acquisitions Dept University of Winnipeg Library 515 Portage Avenue Winnipeg, MB Canada R3B 2E9 m.swanson@uwinnipeg.ca (204)786-9806