Nicole Engard of Bywater Solutions lands in Montana

Image by nengard via Flickr

I know you are all jealous! We get Nicole for two and a half days. Training and a Conference Presentation at Broad Valleys Federation Spring Conference. It will be SO great to have Nicole in Butte where we have just reopened after being flooded in November. We plan on showing her the town and taking her for a soak in the Fairmont Hot Springs…. yeah, you’re jealous! I will update here as the week progresses.

Related Articles

• Book review – Practical Open Source Software for Libraries (mmitblog.wordpress.com)
• Murray, Peter: When Closed Source Companies Contribute to Open Source Communities (dltj.org)
• Two Preconferences at CIL2011 (web2learning.net)

Implementation Checklist

We have been working on setting our preferences and permissions this week.  Our bibliographic records are on the test server and our patron records too.  We are getting ready for testing our own server with the test OPAC.  After we get the kinks worked out I think we will only have our circ records to migrate in an Excel format to the MySql database.  These records will be mapped into the preferences we have set in Koha and if everything goes well with the migration we should be able to step from one platform (Winnebago) to Koha in 48 hours.  I am going to give you a link to our OPAC to check out our records.  If you look at a record you will see a box to the right that says “download” in the drop down you can choose MODSXML or Dublin Core.  Your PC will need to have a program to open these records but MODS opens nicely in Firefox.  What are you looking at? You are looking at a MARC record converted to an XML format that is easier to convert into  digital formats. 

Don’t get me wrong it is not perfect and some bibliographic info is sacrificed but I believe it is the future of interoperability.

Here is the link to Butte’s Newborn OPAC

And here is Nelsonville Ohio’s grown up OPAC