Koha UK School Library setup

[Theldron]

Hi all,

 

We are currently a MLS Eclipse2 school but due to age and lack of support (and cost of lack of support) I have started setting up Koha on a VM for testing.

 

I am going through the documentation but was wondering if anybody can give me some advice for setting this up for a UK school?

 

Thanks

[Theldron]

Anyone using Koha? Has anyone tried Evergreen?

[Asgard]

We are using Koha [emoji1419] I could ask my colleague if he wouldn’t mind chatting to you ? He also helped set it up at his old college

[Theldron]

That would be brilliant thanks. I was just wondering if it can be linked to something like Amazon for book covers etc, can you like to more Z39.50/SRU servers or do you need to?

 

And any other advice I can be given on the setup would be amazing?

 

Many thanks

[unixman_again]

I used to run Koha, but it was a long, long time ago. The Z39.50 servers are useful in that when entering books via ISBN, they will contact a server and return the title, author, extract, etc. You can link to as many as you want, although the more there are, the longer the search will take, especially if one of the servers in the chain is down. We used to link to three, Library of Congress, National Library of Scotland and British Library. The first was good for none fiction, the second for fiction and the third mopped up. For awhile we had CLIVE in the mix. I have no idea where it was, or why we linked to it, but it was often down so searches took forever. We didn't bother about book covers, but from memory you could link to Barnes & Noble for this, and I assume Amazon also.

[Theldron]

Thanks Unixman I am adding the Z39.50 servers but keep getting connection timeout? Is there any firewall rules that need to be in place? Can you run Koha behind a proxy? Edited February 5, 2018 by Theldron

[mavhc]

As z39.50 isn't http you'd need a specific proxy for it, or enable direct access, as it's probably not port 80 that might be easier.

 

Or look into SRU/SRW

[unixman_again]

When I ran Koha, the LEA blocked Z39.50 on account of them not knowing what it did. We had to jump through hoops but we eventually got it upblocked.

[Theldron]

We're with SWGFL I might contact them see what they say.

[Theldron]

I have had an email from SWGFL i dont think they know what Z39.50 is? So just sending some details. I am surprised Koha doesn't have a proxy setting in their config.

[mavhc]

In Notts they only block port 80/443 and require the proxy for that. I guess you'd need SWGFL to have a SOCKS proxy, or use HTTP CONNECT to make a tunnel on an http proxy. You could probably do that with a transparent proxy on your local server if you really need to, it's a pain though.

[Theldron]

Our ISP has unblocked the British Library, Library of Congress and National Library of Scotland. I am not getting any results from the ISBN, only from Title and Author from the Library of Congress. I have checked and the ISBN's are different. On IRSpy: Welcome it gives some UK Z39.50 sites that have good reliability but do not want to give all of them to my ISP can anyone recommned some for me if possible?

 

Thanks