[Koha] Koha Newsletter: Volume 1/Issue 3: March 2010

[Nicole Engard]

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 1, Issue 3: March 2010
Read Online: http://koha-community.org/koha-newsletter-volume-1issue-3-march-2010/
Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/KohaNewsletter

Table of Contents

    * KohaCon 2010
          o KohaCon10 Registrations Open
          o Call for Papers Open
          o Sponsorship
    * Koha News
          o New Koha Community Site
          o Popular Libraries in Argentina Choose Koha
          o Growing Trend: Koha integrated with Kete
    * Koha Tips
          o Meta-searching with Koha and Paspar2


KohaCon 2010
KohaCon10 Registrations Open
by Russel Garlick

The 3rd Koha Conference will be held in Wellington, New Zealand
October 24-29, 2010. The conference consists of a 3 day conference
proper followed by a 3 day hackfest. The conference is open to all
members of the Koha Community and registration is essential. It is
free to attend the conference, but due to room size and other
constraints, the organisers need to know exactly who will be turning
up. If you are looking to get to NZ from the far flung reaches of the
world, then please check out the conference website
www.kohacon10.org.nz. Members of the community have contributed advice
on traveling from the US, Europe and elsewhere. We have also arranged
some accommodation deals with local hotels.
Call for Papers Open
by Russel Garlick

If you have already registered, have you considered giving a talk? The
call for conference papers is also open. We’d love to see
presentations from librarians for librarians, sharing their
experiences, tricks and tips. Talk times are flexible, with long and
short options, so please consider registering as a speaker.
Sponsorship
by Russel Garlick

KohaCon10 is being organised and run by volunteers and is entirely
reliant on sponsorship. The organisors would like to thank the
sponsors that have already come on board (Libriotech, ByWater
Solutions, BibLibre and Catalyst IT). If your company is interested in
sponsoring the
event, please contact Russel Garlick (russ on irc, or
russel.garlick at gmail.com). As a free conference, reliant completely on
sponsorship, we regret that we are unable to provide financial
assistance for anyone wishing to attend the conference.


Koha News
New Koha Community Site
by Owen Leonard

The Koha community has attempted to communicate with LibLime about the
situation without success. The Koha community has nominated the
Horowhenua Library Trust to act as an independent steward of
Koha-related assets like the Koha.org and the Koha trademark. We have
proposed to LibLime that, given their lack of care and interest in
Koha.org, transfer the domain and its management to HLT and let the
Koha community take back control. LibLime has not responded to these
requests.

The community was left with no choice: we had to create a new home for
the Koha project. We can no longer depend on the good will of LibLime.
Koha-community.org came together quickly and beautifully thanks to all
involved. Thanks are owed especially to Liz at the Northeast Kansas
Library System for all her hard work.

If you want to share a link to the real open source Koha, please use
http://koha-community.org.

Read the entire post at http://www.myacpl.org/koha/?p=522.
Popular Libraries in Argentina Choose Koha
by Verónica Lencinas

In 2007 five popular libraries from Córdoba (a province in Argentina)
united to form a union catalog. Popular libraries are non governmental
organizations in Argentina that receive funds from the national
government through the Comisión Nacional Protectora de Bibliotecas
Populares (http://www.conabip.gov.ar). In most villages, towns and
cities they are the only public libraries available. Since there were
no special funding for the union catalog, all work had to be done for
free and free software were the only option considered. In September
2007 the first version of the catalog went online at
http://catalogo.puntobiblio.com running on Koha 2.2.9. Now the network
has broadened to 18 libraries and include now not only popular
libraries but also public, school, academic and special libraries. The
first popular library to implement Koha 3.0 in Argentina was the
Biblioteca Popular República Argentina, who was also the founder of
the network. Now other popular libraries as well as the Comisión
Nacional Protectora de Bibliotecas Populares had shown their interest
in a broader implementation of Koha.
Growing Trend: Koha integrated with Kete
by Walter McGinnis

A number of organizations using Koha are tying in search results from
an affiliated Kete site. These same Koha OPACs are then accessed from
their Kete sites for their search results, too. This makes it easier
for users to discovery complimentary resources no matter which system
the items are stored in. This is accomplished via both software
packages’ support of the OpenSearch standard.

On the Koha side, Chris Cormack from Catalyst IT has written a simple
add-on to the Koha OPAC to take a user’s keyword search terms and
request results from a designated Kete site and place the results in a
sidebar beside the normal catalog results. Kieran Pilkington from
Katipo Communications has also contributed to this code.

The code works fine, but is not apart of the Koha codebase yet as it
could have a better user interface for setting the designated
OpenSearch source by non-technical Koha administrators.

On the Kete site, site administrators simply fill out a form to
identify the Koha catalogue’s search interface as an external search
source. A similar sidebar then will appear next to the Kete site’s
search results. In Kete, there is also the ability to automatically
look up an item’s title in external search sources and display their
results while on the item’s Kete detail page.

Since both the Koha add-on and the Kete External Search Sources
functionality are built around the OpenSearch standard, other services
that follow this standard can also be tied in as search target. The
sites using this functionality are in New Zealand, Australia, and the
Middle East.


Koha Tips
Meta-searching with Koha and Paspar2
by Mark Osborne

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

Sound familiar? It’s the opening line of Tale of Two Cities by Charles
Dickens. It’s a great novel but we don’t have a copy of it in our
library. But then with freely available e-books and public domain
audio books it’s probably not the end of the world. What we do need to
have is the ability for our students to search for and find these
resources; which is why we’re setting up Paspar2 integration with
Koha. It allows us to set up meta-searching beyond our catalogue,
querying Project Gutenberg, Librivox.org, Google Books and a host of
other online resources. That means if we don’t have a physical holding
of an item, our students can still access a copy for an e-book reader,
laptop or iPod.

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Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.
Please send future story ideas to nengard at gmail.com.