Zope folks, I have been a python programmer for about as long as I have been a librarian, which is seven years. I consult with a large metropolitan library regarding their automated systems. I recently began the planning stages of taking over as the sole librarian at a local church and at a very small high school. I am familiar with the Integrated Library System (ILS) products from most of the major vendors, so I am also familiar with their prices and problems. I began looking for an Open Source option for my new libraries (see http://www.oss4lib.org). There are only a few viable options. Koha is a Perl/MySql system currently used in several New Zealand public libraries. There are two SourceForge projects that have semi-working catalog and circulation systems: OpenBiblio and PhpMyLibrary, both using PHP/MySql. Judging from Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/08/22/2040245.shtml), very few programmers have an appreciation for the complexity of an ILS. Zope has been identified by the library community as a tool for patron portals (see http://www.oss4lib.org), but I can't find any mention of a Zope-based ILS, maybe because Zope programmers do appreciate the complexities of metadata and dealing with the MARC format. All of that was prelude to this: Zope seems like the ideal platform for an ILS. I am more of a Zope integrator than a Zope developer, but it seems like an ILS in Zope would be less complicated and more flexible than a similar program using another framework. OCLC has a MARC to Dublin Core translator (http://alcme.oclc.org/marc2dc/index.html). I assume that something like this could be used to populate catalog records and possibly even holdings records (there is a MARC format for Holdings Information). What are your thoughts? I have no experience designing such a large system, but I would much rather use a Zope-based ILS than any of the current Open Source offerings. Thanks for your time, --Tim Chase chase@iac.net