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)