[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] does the software support unicode searches?

[Anoop Atre]

Nancy
Since we are on the Evergreen list I'd probably have stuck to answering 
your initial question. We do want more folks trying out Evergreen : )

In any case as has been pointed out both Evergreen and Koha are capable 
of fulfilling your needs. I don't have much experience with openbiblio 
so can't speak to that solution.

On 12/07/2011 11:21 PM, smurfett at gmail.com wrote:
> But I'm trying to find out how much these software support other
> languages, in searches, cataloging, pulling down data from z39.30
> servers from other countries, and webopac interfaces.

Evergreen and Koha match well and completely support the requirements 
you mention above, Koha has a few more languages with different degrees 
of completion [ http://translate.koha-community.org/ ]. Evergreen 
currently has translations for Armenian, Czech, English (Canada), 
English (US), French (Canada), Russian, and Spanish. Chinese as Dan/Ben 
mentioned has been previously available and needs updating/inclusion 
into the current releases. I'm sure you'd love to see your name listed 
as the contributor who finished the Evergreen Chinese translation : )

I'd say you should give Evergreen a try and also check out the other 
options, there are robust & helpful communities for each of them who can 
help you along. As someone who is comfortable with Linux you will be 
fine getting started. I'd begin with the demos but getting your hands 
dirty and installing Evergreen (2.1 or latest) would give you the best 
feel for the system as I'm sure you would have guessed.

There is an older virtual machine Dan Scott setup which you could 
download and give a try if you want an easier path to testing it locally 
and even try upgrading to 2.1 [ 
http://evergreen-ils.org/downloads.php#evergreen_vm ]. Here is some 
sample data Mike Peters made available [ 
http://help.evergreen.lib.in.us/generate-demodata.tar.gz ] and 
instructions to load them into the database   [ 
http://paste.lisp.org/display/124819 ].

Lately installing Evergreen has gotten easier but definitely needs an 
understanding of Linux, right now most of us run it on Debian Squeeze or 
Ubuntu Lucid. Installing Koha from scratch is about the same complexity, 
of course it is available as a Debian package which helps quite a bit. 
We have been trying to get Evergreen packaged into Debian and made some 
headway over this past summer but not there yet. Setting up the library 
specific rules is where Koha gets to be a bit more straight forward as I 
understand, I have not looked into that much so this is based on what 
I've heard from others.

As for comparing the systems, I should mention that the website Ian 
mentioned lists an older version of Evergreen also...we are at 2.1 and 
2.2 is being worked on currently. It's hard to really keep up 
comparisons between fast moving open source systems on a minute level, 
but if you want a big picture comparison the website does a decent job. 
Also I'd say just because Koha is used more than Evergreen in the 
non-western world doesn't make it the first choice, just means Koha has 
been around longer and being the first open source library management 
system certainly gave it a wider market adoption.

Hope this helps and I didn't ramble on too much!

Cheers

-- 

Anoop Atre
IS Developer & Integrator, PALS
PH: 507.389.5060
OF: 3022 Memorial Library (Office-ML 3022)
-- 
"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens"
  ~ Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller