[Koha] Official Koha Newsletter: Volume 1, Issue 1: January 2010

[Nicole Engard]

Hello all,

The first official Koha Newsletter in ages has been published.  You
can read it online (complete with active links) here:
http://koha.web2learning.net/2010/01/volume-1issue-1-january-2010/ or
you can read it in plain text below:

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Official Koha Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 1: January 2010

Table of Contents

    * Events:
          o Venue and Dates booked for Kohacon10
          o Code4Lib 2010 Koha Preconference
          o KUDOS Meeting at ALA Midwinter
    * News from Koha Libraries
          o News from Crawford County
          o NYU Health Sciences Libraries migrate to Koha
          o Middletown Township Public Library Live on Koha
          o Saugeen Library Consortium goes Koha
    * Tips & Tricks
          o BibLibre’s Community Branch of Koha 3.2
          o New Koha Manual Available in Git
          o Speed tips for Z39.50 catalogue searching


Venue and Dates booked for Kohacon10
by Chris Cormack

So we now have a venue (The Wellington Townhall) and we have dates:

October 25 – November 2 2010

    * 3 day conference
    * followed by 4 day hackfest

The conference has a website http://kohacon.appspot.com/ which is
pretty sparse at the moment but will be filled with more information
as we get it.

If you blog, use twitter, identica or flickr … please use the
#kohacon10 hashtag to tag you posts/pictures/tweets.

And as always any help offered, or suggestions gratefully received –
this includes sponsorship offers.

Code4Lib 2010 Koha Preconference
by Ian Walls

At the Code4Lib annual conference in Asheville, North Carolina,
Brendan Gallagher of ByWater Solutions and Ian Walls of the NYU Health
Sciences Libraries will be hosting an all-day Koha preconference
session. The session will take place on Monday, February 22nd, from
9AM to 4:30PM Eastern Time. The session will include updates of the
latest goings-on in the community, roadmaps for Koha 3.2 and 3.4, and
an afternoon hackfest. More information about Code4Lib 2010 sessions
can be found at http://code4lib.org/conference/2010/schedule.

KUDOS Meeting at ALA Midwinter
by Vicki Teal Lovely

Just a quick note to let you know that there will be a KUDOS (Koha
Users and Developers, US) meeting at ALA midwinter in Boston. It will
be held on Saturday, January 16 at 3 PM at the Boston Public Library.
The room is not known at this time, but please get it on your
calendars if you will be at ALA. We will send further information to
the lists. You can also check the KUDOS web site
(http://kudos.koha.org) for updates.

News from Crawford County
by Kyle Hall

Here at the Crawford County Federated Library System we are nearly
finished with our switchover from Koha dev_week to Koha 3.x. The large
number of changes between the two has meant more time spent on the
transition than anticipated, but the effort will certainly have paid
off. I have been porting many of has dev_week additions to Koha,
including the “Fines on Return” and “Clubs & Services” features to
Koha 3. To allow others the ability to access my work, I has created a
Sourceforge project named Koha Plus ( as in “Koha, Plus some more
features” (http://sourceforge.net/projects/koha-plus/). The CCFLS
staff has also begun offering their knowledge and expertise with Koha
to others as Mill Run Technology Solutions ( http://millruntech.com/
).
NYU Health Sciences Libraries migrate to Koha
by Ian Walls

The New York University Health Sciences Libraries migrated from their
previous Millennium ILS to Koha on Sept. 1st, 2009. The installation,
setup and migration were all done in-house, and staff training was
purchased from ByWater Solutions. The NYUHSL look forward to
developing Koha to further meet the needs of medical and academic
libraries.

Middletown Township Public Library Live on Koha
by Susan O’Neal

In mid-October, the Middletown Township Public Library in NJ went live
with Koha. The library, which circulates over 900,000 items per year
and serves a community of 68,000 from a main library and three
branches is the third public library in New Jersey to migrate to Koha.
Middletown partnered with the East Brunswick Public Library and PTFS
on a substantial development list of twenty-eight items, which are
being submitted to the Koha community as we sign off on them. Among
these are batch editing of items, creation of a shelving cart status,
a bestsellers club, an OPAC “Did you mean?” function, and many report
templates. We also integrated our self checkout and RFID services from
our vendor, TechLogic, computer management services with Comprise
Technologies, and a phone notification system [itiva] with
TalkingTech. This route to our new ILS was necessary because we did
not have the IT talent in-house to do the development ourselves, and
PTFS presented us with a hosting and migration services proposal that
was highly competitive. Our team is building skills in writing reports
and strategic problem solving, but someday, and hopefully not too many
years in the future, we’ll have the skills to be as independent as
many of our Koha colleagues are today. Our library’s web address is :
http://mtpl.org
Saugeen Library Consortium goes Koha
by Norma Graham and Agnes Rivers-Moore

In the autumn of 2009, the six libraries comprising the Saugeen
Library Consortium in Southwestern Ontario went live with Koha. We
were all Spectrum orphans – cut off from support and upgrades for our
old ILS when Follett bought out Spectrum – and got together as a group
of small-town and rural public libraries to consider our options in
2007. We chose Koha in part so that we would never again be forced
into a similar situation by another proprietary database company.
Moreover, small public libraries are continually cash-strapped, and an
ILS that costs more than our entire annual collections budget was
certainly not in the cards!

We were fortunate to receive a grant from the Ministry of Citizenship
and Culture’s Library Strategic Development Fund to cover most of the
costs incurred by our programmer, Petrus Van Bork of Virtual Libraries
Corporation, who prepared the new system and migrated our data to it.
There were some major challenges along the way – like the fact that
several of the libraries had been using a number of different kinds of
barcodes, necessitating the creation of a ‘healer code’ so that the
new system could read all the barcodes – but we’re very happy with
Koha. It works beautifully for our small public libraries, and both
staff members and library users are thrilled with the features it
offers.

The Grey Highlands Public Library, for example, is a three-branch
system that has never before had a union database. If one branch
wanted to know if a book was at another branch, they would have to
place a phonecall! Now a few keystrokes accesses all the information
needed.

Our users are really pleased – and surprised – when staff inform them
that they can now browse the collections of all branches, place their
own holds, renew material themselves, and even make suggestions for
new additions to the collection and browse the libraries’ shelves!

There have been some adjustments to make for staff, especially dealing
with holds and with the cataloguing interface. In small libraries, not
many staff members have the training to create MARC records from
scratch, and using Z39.50, though very slick, isn’t always fruitful.
And in multi-branch systems, holds cannot be placed for specific
copies (even though it appears to be a function available in Koha). We
are hopeful that the specific-copy holds function will become usable
in the next iteration of Koha.

BibLibre’s Community Branch of Koha 3.2
by Henri-Damien Laurent and Nicole C. Engard

BibLibre has been maintaining a community branch of the upcoming Koha
3.2 release. If you’d like to check out some of the new awesome
features and get a first hand look at what’s coming, you can easily
set up a new branch on your Koha development installation for this
branch.

Once in your Koha git directory you want to use the following commands:

git branch biblibre_branch
# creates a new branch from your current branch
git checkout biblibre_branch # change your current branch to biblibre_branch
git remote add biblibre git://git.biblibre.com/koha_biblibre.git #
adds a remote repository
git remote update # gets data from remotes repositories
git rebase biblibre/3.2_community

This will create a community branch that you can test on your own
local development installation.

New Koha Manual Available in Git
by Nicole C. Engard

Since taking the role of Documentation Manager for Koha I have had
several suggestions, compliments and complaints. Among the suggestions
and complaints were the issues people had with translating and
printing the manual. For this reason I have started all over for Koha
3.2! I am now writing the Koha manual using DocBook. This format will
allow for easy printing to PDF and HTML, easier translation, and
easier sharing via Git. BibLibre has set up a git repository for me to
share my work with you all. You can keep up with my work here:
http://git.biblibre.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=kohadocs;a=summary and in
the near future you’ll be able to read the manual in plain HTML on the
official Koha site.

Speed tips for Z39.50 catalogue searching
by Agnes Rivers-Moore

I have been testing Z39.50 searching from time to time.

   1. Response times:

      I have found that most systems respond very quickly, say 5
seconds. However, if there is one system that takes a while to
respond, you get to wait until all the systems have sent their
response before any hits are displayed.

      This said, it makes sense to check the response time of each
database that you use, and to search only the fast ones in your
initial search (that is, turn on ‘Checked (searched by default)’ in
your Z39.50 target settings).

      For example, I found that I can search 14 libraries in under 6
seconds, but if I include Amicus in the list, the same search takes
about 60 seconds.
   2. ISBN searching:

      Not all systems can search by ISBN. Strange, I know.
Unfortunately, many of the libraries that have Z39.50 access to their
data, are using Horizon, which does not do ISBN searches. This is why
you may often do a search by ISBN, no hits, so you do it again with
Author/title, and the libraries you searched before pop up showing the
ISBN that you searched before.

      To identify these, I searched for a few really popular books by
ISBN, and for those sites that did to respond, I checked whether they
had a Horizon system (lib-web-cats is really useful for this). If they
were not Horizon systems, I found their online catalogue, picked a few
titles, then searched for those ISBNs through Z39.50. If those failed
I knew the system did not support ISBN searching.

      So, my suggestion is that cataloguers go through the Z39.50
settings in your systems, and set any really slow responders so that
they are not checked by default. Also if you usually search by ISBN
first, set any libraries that do not support ISBN search not to be
checked.

      Then, if your first search by ISBN fails, do the search again by
author/title, and select all except the slow ones. Lastly search the
slow systems only, if no other sources have hits.

This should improve the time taken to search for each MARC record dramatically.

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Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.

Please send future story ideas to nengard at gmail.com