All, in response to Mr. P K Upadhyay's message on Koha technology stack and its search engine: 1. Solr Search Engine: Agreed, Solr/Lucene is better. But Zebra is very good too, I don't beleive any library has serious issues with Zebra. Also Koha will have Solr very soon. You can see a working implementation of Koha with Solr here: http://178.79.186.94 (OPAC) To try searches use following search terms: a* (to see a lot of records and then refine) Sample Chinese search term: 梁诗正等编 2. On Perl & Mysql: Perl is very fast, and it has vast software libraries (see cpan.org) that make programming new features on Koha very quick. MySQL is the world's most widely used Open Source DBMS, very large libraries run on this platform without any problems, e.g. British Council Libraries in India and Sri Lanka have 2 million loans per year. This is running smoothly on Mysql. Java and PostgreSQL are very good, but there is no reason to select a software purely on one's perceptions of a technology stack. The fact is that Perl & MySQL have served Koha and its user very well over the last 10 years and likely to continue to do so in the future. 3. Koha vs. Newgenlib Koha is a true open source with a wide global community and a wide developer and vendor base. This is the true advantage of Koha over Newgenlib. The implications of this are: - Koha is likely to improve exponentially due to the wide pool of sponsors and developers - Koha is going to be open source forever, no single entity controls the software. Vendors can come and go but this has not impact on the health of the software and its development trajectory. - Koha is developed using a true open source development process. Diverse group of people including librarians, developers, software architects are involved in decision making. This makes the software quality better. Thanks, Savitra Sirohi Nucsoft OSS Labs Professional support for Open Source Software http://www.osslabs.biz Message: 1 Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:41:34 +0530 From: Upadhyay P K <pku@nic.in> To: Shamprasad Pujar <pujar@igidr.ac.in>, lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] Fwd: Verus starts NewGenLib adaptation program Message-ID: <fc6d1cf6b047.4ebac95e@nic.in> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear friends, It is very good posting in this forum on adoption of OSS and other softwares. There have been varying opinion. Last year I had posted various mails on pros and cons of OSS and Commercial softwares. In relation to NewGenLib and KOHA, technically I would prefer NGL to KOHA. Few of the reasons are: Technology platform of NewGenLib has been PsotgreSQL backend, Apache server and JAVA at front end. These are the most preferred choices like .Net for development of softwares, although various technologies are being used for others including Open and proprietary. I do not understand why developers of KOHA application used/chose PERL langauage for front development and MySQL as back end. What will be long term implication, time will tell. Although KOHA has been customized for PostgreSQL and Windows lateron. Another fascinating technology of NewGenlib is their search engine Solr and ZOTERO. For Bibliographic and Authority data searches NGL now uses Solr. Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Even DSpace also uses Lucene and now it has customized for use of Solr. Again here, KOHA is using ZEBRA search engine not so popular like Lucene and Solr. I find it easy to integrate DSpace and NewGenLib with portal using JSP and common connectors more of JAVA technology. Both of softwares are licensed as GPL not BSD. Although I prefer BSD, DSpace is BSD licensed. Both the software are now being supported in India by private firms, it is good. Again I would repeat that either Open Source, Free or commercial, total implementation of the information system/software that matters and it hardly makes any difference in cost. Some of the research articles will help you to understand the efforts of library automation and digital library implementation. I liked one such paper by S R Birje on Library Automation case study in SRLELS Journal of Information Management, V48 (2), April 2011, p131-145. Although some of the cost and effort estimation could also have been incorporated in this paper like OPAC Hosting on Internet server, Database Hosting, Customization, Post implementation support, etc. for others to understand implementation. Even Dr Goudar also comprehensively on his experience in migration from one application to other. If any one like to discuss more on the issue, I would be happy to extend my inputs. with kind regards P K Upadhyay NIC, Delhi -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.