Koha 3 stable version now released. You can download from the usual location: http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz 1. Zebra plugin - Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine 2. New installer - based on the common Perl module ExtUtils::MakeMaker, the new installer makes it a snap to get Koha running on just about any platform. 3. Standard APIs - Koha 3 supports a number of important library search and retrieval standards and microformats, such as SRU/W, Z39.50 and COinS/OpenURL. Also supported is the popular Internet standard: OpenSearch (http://opensearch.a9.com/) created by Amazon's A9. Records are stored internally in an SGML-like format and can be retrieved in MARCXML, Dublin Core, MODS, RSS, Atom, RDF-DC, SRW-DC, OAI-DC, and EndNote; 4. Cross-platform, multi-RDBMS, Web-server agnostic - Run Koha on the platform of your choice: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris. Koha 3 also includes better support for multi-RDBMS (MySQL 5.0 and PostgreSQL), and runs under Apache2, IIS, or the web server of your choosing. 5. Multi-lingual support - Koha was designed from the ground up for multilingual libraries. Koha 3 can handle Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease (BiDi). Koha's index engine (Zebra) can handle record formats containing any UNICODE compliant script, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean. Zebra has this support via the ICU libraries created and maintained by IBM. 6. New templates - Koha's staff and patron interfaces are developed with a template system that's easy to theme. 7. Koha 3 has quite a few new modules, as well as enhancements to existing modules, including: news writer, label creator, calendar, OPAC comments, MARC staging and overlay, notices, transaction logs, guided reports with a data dictionary and task scheduler, classification sources/filing rules. -- Vimal Kumar V. Asst. Librarian Asian School of Business Technopark, Trivandrum-695 581 Web: www.asb.edu.in/vimal/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt" -Patrick White -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.