Welcome to Koha

Dear User,

Hello, and welcome to Koha. The manual you're reading and the software that it documents are the fruits of a lot of volunteer labor, hard work by the staff of Katipo Communications, and donations by Horowhenua Library Trust and other libraries.

Koha was initially developed in 1999 and the first library went live in January of 2000. Koha's code has been in production since then and is continuing to move towards higher levels of functionality and standards compliance, including embracing the international records and cataloging standards MARC and Z39.50. Our development community has also grown and now includes contributors on four continents and ports in several languages.

This is one of the beauties of Free Software -- all of the people involved have reasons to work on a Library System, by working together they've been able to create something far more useful than anything they could have done on their own, while enjoying the benefits of all the work done before.

Why is all this feel good philosophy here? Isn't this a 'Welcome to Koha' letter, you ask? Well, this stuff is part of our welcome. We're proud of the work that we've done so far. We're also excited about the improvements and additions that are just over the horizon. We want you to to get comfortable with Koha, to make it your own. In fact, we want you to be so comfortable with it that you're ready to make changes in it, and we want you to feel at home enough to contribute them back to the community.

We're a friendly bunch, we've got a users mailing list where you should feel free to ask questions. You can subscribe by filling out the form at http://koha.org/mailing_list.html . If you'd rather ask questions in real time, you can use irc and meet with us on the #Koha-Support channel at irc.katipo.co.nz, port 6667.

I hope I've convinced you to join the project, but even if I haven't I hope that you'll enjoy the time you spend with our software.

Happy cataloging!

Pat Eyler

Kaitiaki, Koha