Re: Tellico questions - data files back up, scaling & isbn lookup

HI Stephan,

On Thursday 29 December 2011, Stephan Debelle wrote:
> I am new to this list so forgive me if these questions have already been
> asked but I could not seem to find the answer on the kde forums.  I am
> volunteering for a school (non-profit) and we are using almost
> exclusively Open Source software.  After looking a few options such as
> Koha & Evergreen to manage the School's library collection, I stumbled
> onto Tellico and have been very impressed with the ease of use and
> capabilities.

Thanks! This is the right place for questions. The forums works too.

> 1- Tellico not being DB driven, which directories are storing the
> collection data so I can include them in the backup?

All the information, except for the images, are stored in the data file 
itself. You can choose to have the images in the data file, too, but with a 
collection of your size, I wouldn't recommend it. In the settings, there's 
an "Image Storage" option. The first option is the data file. The second will 
store all the images for all Tellico data in the same place, 
~/.kde/share/apps/tellico/data/ (unless you moved your KDE home somewhere 
else). The third option will store the images in the same location as the 
data file, in a directory with the same name of the data file with _files 
appended. 

> 2- The school has a collection of approximately 10,000 books, will
> tellico be able to scale and handle this volume?

It should. The primary issue might be if you have 10,000 big images in the 
collection, too. I've tried to improve the performance with large images, 
and others have contributed patches, too. So I'd give it a shot. :)

> 3- The school being a French billingual school, many of the books have
> been purschased in France.  While the ISBN lookup works fine and
> configured for Amazon & isbn.com I still have a good % of books not
> getting any data.  I was wondering if anyone could suggest another
> source to configure for books originating from France?

Definitely try using amazon.fr. I think the UBuntu package is compiled with 
z39.50 support, too, and in that case, the French SUDOC database is 
available. http://www.sudoc.abes.fr Or you could find other french z39.50 
sources. Freebase would be another option.

> 4- Some books have multiple copies, I could not find a field set up to
> indicate the number of copies?  While I configured a new field for this
> purpose, the check out process only sees 1 copy and therefore the other
> copies are not available for checkout.  The work around seems to be to
> create a duplicate of the book but I am wondering if there is a better
> way of handling this?

There's no better way that the workaround you noted. I'll see if I can add 
that feature. The check-out capability wasn't built with the idea of having 
multiple copies in mind.

Thanks for the interest!
Robby