Hi All, Im one of the programmers working on Koha. And I can agree with what Willem says, I have been in touch with Griogair who has been working on OpenBook. And im looking forward to their next source release.

Further is should be understood that we FULLY support KOHA's efforts, but also all of us should understand that KOHA is written with a local important solution in mind, where we are looking at a broader picture. I clearly have no interest to start a KOHA versus OpenBook war, because the library world as it is already to fragmented and to crowded with religious wars (lets just look at meta data and 856 field wars to name a few or MARC21 versus UNIMARC etc....)

However while this was true for the intitial release of Koha, and in fact most of the work im doing on it is still at the behest of the local library. It is in general no longer true, Steve is working hard on MARC support for koha as Daniel noted. And has also made lots of other changes to better suit koha to the libraries he is involved withs needs. Including a web based circulation, and a really tight circulation API. Which should make building circulation interfaces a doddle. So really what I would like to see is more communication between the Koha and OpenBook camps. Id really like to see them become much more similair to each other, so that the differences wont be in functionality, but in the chosen language to implement that functionality. Koha is perl, OpenBook is PHP. The more we can help each other the better the library system we end up with will be. Chris -- Chris Cormack Programmer 025 500 789 Katipo Communications Ltd chris@katipo.co.nz www.katipo.co.nz