he panui koha 21 November 2002 # # From the Kaitiaki: Sorry that it's been so long since I've put one of these out. It always seems like something else gets in the way, doesn't it? Hopefully the breadth and importance of the news below is engaging enought for you to forgive my lapse in sending things out lately. Development: Paul is closing in on the next 1.3 release and Steve is plugging away at the next 1.2 release, but the biggest development news this time around is administrative. We've decided that the 1.3 series is such a radical departure from the existing 1.2 stuff, that it will become Koha 2.0 instead of 1.4. This release marks a watershed for us, and deserves the recognition that 2.0 will give it. Congratulations to Paul and everyone else who has been involved in the 1.3 work. Community: Chris Cormack (the release manager for the 1.2 series) recently attended two conferences in Ohio, here's what he had to say: Well I think the trip went really well, Stephen and the rest of the NPL are feeling even more positive now. The OLC conference was good lots of interesting topics and tho we were the last session on the last day. We still had about 20-30 people stay to listen about koha. Got to the think linux show the next day and got my pass and stuff. Listened to the Linux terminal server project and other thin clients. Interesting stuff for libraries, specially coupled with the cool serial over ip hubs they were showing off as well. Then came the presentation, I didnt end up using my slides because they were aimed at a more libraryish audience. So I talked about koha, explaining what a library system is to start :-) Then did the history of koha, were we are at now, how they can help, how to get it etc. About 25 people listening. People drove in from Michigan and from Grandview Heights (near Columbus, Ohio), three to four hour drives for both groups, just to talk about Koha and how it might fit into their libraries. (One of the libraies is a consortium that has a circulation of about 1.5 million a year! They'll both be in touch with NPL and Koha. All in all a very positive trip it was heartening how many people had heard of the project. And the guy from debian was keen to get koha into the distro. Koha also had a stall (manned by Katipo and HLT) at the 2002 Lianza conference http://www.confer.co.nz/lianza2002/ -- way to go! On a different tack, I'd like to welcome The Linux Box (http://www.linuxbox.nu/) of Ann Arbor, Michigan as the newest vendor offering commercial support for Koha. If you are interested in supporting Koha, please let me know. We'd be happy to add you to our support vendors page at http://koha.org/installation/support.html French Koha: Paul Poulain has announced that demo.koha-fr.org and fr.koha.org are now live. The first is a demo site where you can play with the emerging 1.3 series (it's especially nice to see that Koha is becoming bilingual). The second site is the french language home for Koha. These efforts are both huge wins for Koha in terms of visibility. Nicolas Morin wrote: And the other day I went to a formation session on library web sites: it turned out every single librarian attending (a group of about 20 people from different libraries) knew that Koha existed : "isn't it that open source library system that's talked about?" So I think librarians awareness about Koha is good here in France : but to really take off we would need one first library to use it. I think what worked well in France so far is that, so to speak, we played a duet : one programmer who can answer questions about the software, the install, etc; and one librarian that can publicize Koha and get colleagues interested. Couldn't we try to set up such "duets" elsewhere? This does look like a good model to follow within our other language translation groups. The french community Koha mailing list is up to 51 subscribers, and there seems to be a great deal of work and excitement on it. Two last bits of news from the french koha community: * the templating of the OPAC now being over, translation of the OPAC will begin very soon : to start working on the translation of the software itself is obviously a major step towards implementing Koha in France. * This week also, Koha-France contributed a list of report features we would love to see implemented in Koha : see http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=ReportFeatures for this list. Any contribution to this list is welcome. If you want to get involved, the Koha wiki is a good place to look at : http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=KohaProject thanks, the Koha team