I am new to the KDE forums so forgive me if these questions have already been asked but I could not seem to find the answers.

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.

I am currently testing v 2.3.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 and it works well. We scanned a few books at random and imported the ISBN into tellico and were able to populate most of the books data using isbn.com or amazon.

The questions I have:

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

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

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?

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?

Thank you in advance!

For completeness, I'll copy my answers to you here from the mailing list.

steph33 wrote: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.

steph33 wrote: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.

steph33 wrote: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

steph33 wrote: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.