Koha Earns its Stripes
Joshua FerraroIf you’ve been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems in terms of scalability, stability, and features, this article is for you. We’re going to take a whirlwind tour of Koha 2.4, focusing on a sneak preview of Koha’s latest feature: the ZOOM Plugin. Koha’s ZOOM support is implemented with Zebra (http://indexdata.dk/zebra), a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Zebra catapaults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. Koha 2.4 is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.
About 6 years ago, I was facing the prospect of replacing our
largest library’s public Internet computers. They were several years
old, and getting flakier by the day. At the time I was only maintaining
our nine libraries’ computers part time while also doing the job of
administrative assistant, so I wanted to find a way to make maintaining
these computers less time-consuming. I was just beginning to learn to
use Linux, and somewhere along the line I heard about the LTSP, the
Linux Terminal Server Project. The LTSP is a software package that
allows you to connect a number of thin client terminals to a central
Linux server.