I had a look at Koha as an open source library system we might use at work and I promised I was going to look at phpmylibrary the next day. Well I didn’t have time but I did manage to look at it just recently and here is what I found.
First off it installed very easily which was nice. We got it up and running with some problems ie we had to turn Globals on and under PHP this is normally considered a no no. This rung alarm bells in my head but I continued on.
Next thing I noticed was the code. It might be because I am used to Perl but the code just looked messy. This is no reason to judge it so I had a look at the main feature ie loading and understanding MARC21.
I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had noticed that they only support USMARC. I left a message on one of their mailing lists asking about the possibility of using MAR21 but heard nothing. Which was another bad sign i.e. from what I can tell its not a very active project.
Next thing I will be looking at is CDS ISIS which is a suite of tools written by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
CDS-ISIS is very cool. I’ve used it when I was in school (information science).
So far I think it’s quite nice. One of the main features for me is that is has an active community and they are helpfull.
I am currently trying to migrate some old CAIRS TMS data into CDS ISIS and this is not so nice. I am having to write a custom MARC21 parser to do it and the MARC21 standard is a bit of a pig for someone doing a migration 😉
cds isis may be the best for now. but nowdays there are alot of library software system that free! (opensource) such as openbiblio, koha, emilda, etc.
but for several reasons, im still using cds isis at this moment :),
i’m using isisonline to make online the isis databases. isisonline is maintained by knowledge management research group(kmrg), a research group with bandung institut of technology(ITB), Indonesia.
please, do a try? you can also make a try igloo. for that purposes.
regards from Indonesia