[Koha-devel] Introduction

[J. Kenneth Riviere]

Seeing the request for people to introduce themselves, I thought I'd 
de-lurk.  I've only just joined the list and haven't really gotten started 
with Koha, but I'm interested in learning.  I've been a programmer and 
systems analyst for more than 20 years.

I started my career working at Georgia Tech in the Library.  We developed 
our own MARC bibliographic record processing software in COBOL on a CDC 
Cyber computer using the NOS operating system which used a 6 bit character 
set.  That was quite a challenge to deal with the variable length fields 
and maintain the international characters in the bibliographic records.  We 
had to read and interpret 8 bit characters as binary values from 9-track 
tapes mailed from OCLC to update our bibliographic data which was all 
stored on 9-track tapes (there simply wasn't enough disk space to hold the 
entire catalog except once a year during Christmas break we'd take over the 
entire campus computer in order to produce our micro-fiche catalog).

We worked with Sirsi to develop their first implementation of a library 
circulation system.  This was done on a TI-990 running TI's DX-10 operating 
system and was again written in COBOL.  It used CP/M micros as intelligent 
workstations.  This was eventually rewritten for Ultrix in C, but the C 
code was proprietary to Sirsi so I never worked with that directly.  We 
were the first installation of Sirsi's package.

We eventually added a BRS search system running on an IBM mainframe under 
MVS and CICS.

When budget cuts led to me being laid off I tried to get work in other 
libraries, but without an MLS I couldn't even get an interview, despite my 
years of Library Automation experience.

I eventually spent most of the next 10 years working with Informix on Unix 
platforms writing code in Informix's 4GL language (a procedural wrapper for 
SQL), perl, C, C++, and more recently doing some web work using PHP and MySQL.

My current company looks to be getting ready to go belly up.  I've been 
thinking of going back for that MLS and trying to get back into the library 
systems market.  I just discovered the Koha package and it sounds like an 
exciting endeavor.  It occurs to me that if there are any libraries in the 
southeast USA that are considering Koha then I might be able to get some 
consulting work or even a Systems Librarian job in such a setting.  I don't 
know how much help I'll be since I'll be working on my own time and am not 
yet familiar with the system, but I'll probably continue to lurk for awhile 
and see what I can pick up.  In the meantime I'll boot up my Linux box and 
see about getting Koha installed so that I can see what it can do.

-JoKeR (J. Kenneth Riviere)