[Web4lib] RE: Open source support models

[Dan Scott]

2008/7/10 Caitlin Nelson <cnelson at hawaii.edu>:
<snip>
> I thought I would chime in as a librarian in a single-librarian small
> college library.  I'm fairly proficient in web and computer technology,
> familiar enough with installation processes on Windows, Mac and Linux, and I
> have a strong interest in learning more.  We recently wanted to install Koha
> on VMWare for our collection of 1200 monographs, and I tell you I'm having a
> heck of a time!  It's taken me two weeks of daily tweaking to even get the
> thing installed, let alone working (z3950 is still nonoperational, among
> other things).

Hey Caitlin:

Have you tried an Evergreen VMWare image (from
http://open-ils.org/downloads.php)? It would easily support your 1200
monographs (in fact, the Debian VMWare image comes loaded with 13,000
records from the Gutenberg collection for demo data). I'm one of the
developers on the project, and I started building VMWare images on
Debian back when I was getting my feet wet with Evergreen because it
was, ah... challenging to install. Along the way, I've tried to ease
the installation and configuration process, and I think it's come a
fair ways since late 2006 - but one of the students at my university
was hired by Equinox to specifically tackle install and configuration
this summer, and we're seeing some huge improvements now.

As for Z39.50 support, well, the Z39.50 client has been operational
since day one, and enabling Z39.50 connectivity to Evergreen is
anticipated in the 1.4 release (September 2008). So keep an eye on us,
even if we don't do everything you need right now. And heck - let us
know if there are things you need; us academics have to stick
together! Our mailing lists are over at
http://open-ils.org/listserv.php - right now I'm looking for feedback
on requirements for academic reserves, for example.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University