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

[Irma Birchall]

Congratulations to Nicole and to all the contributors.  The Koha Newsletter
is awesome!

Irma
CALYX information essentials





-----Original Message-----
From: koha-consort-bounces at incolsa.net
[mailto:koha-consort-bounces at incolsa.net] On Behalf Of Nicole Engard
Sent: Friday, 15 January 2010 11:53 PM
To: Koha; Koha Consortia
Subject: [KOHA-Consort] Official Koha Newsletter: Volume 1,Issue 1: January
2010

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:

-----------------------------

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.

------------------

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

Please send future story ideas to nengard at gmail.com
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