[Koha-devel] koha 2.4 tools & requirements

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 11:11:54AM +0200, Paul POULAIN wrote:
> my question is : should we add some technical requirements to Koha 2.4 ? 
> things like Perl modules or non-perl modules (like yaz, that is a 
> requirement for z3950 client & server) ?
> 
> I think we should be very careful in "components" selecting. Koha is 
> hard enough to set up, we should not make is harder.
I think this is an excellent question. If we do add more components we'll
need to make sure they are a part of a long-term strategy to support
something we really want. For example, I was recently contacted by a
potential client wondering whether Koha supported any archival standards
such as EAD (http://www.loc.gov/ead/). Currently, adding support for
EAD would require some way to insert EAD records into the Koha SQL
database (currently split between MARC and old Koha tables). If we 
were using Lucene, it would be a simple matter of creating an index
on those records since they're in XML.

I really like the idea of seperating our database into two databases:
one is a database of bibliographic (and other) records; the other is
a database _about_ the books (things like holdings, item statuses,
location, etc.).

Koha's SQL is pretty good at handling the database _about_ the books,
though I think we could optimize it to work even faster -- but as
far as handling the database of bibliographic records, SQL is
quite limited in terms of scalability and flexability. Lucene or
other textual database engines have lots of nice feature built in,
things like boolian searching, relevance ranking, full-text 
searching, etc.

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