[Koha] Official Koha Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 4: April 2012

[Daniel Grobani]

Official Koha Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 4: April 2012

[Below is the text of the newsletter. For active links and a more
readable format, please visit
http://koha-community.org/koha-newsletter-volume-3-issue-4-april-2012]

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 3, Issue 4: April 2012

Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.

Please submit news items to danielg.koha at gmail.com.

Table of Contents

    Koha Development
        Koha 3.8.0 Released
        Koha 3.10 Roles
        Koha Statistics
        Browse Headings Using Solr
        SemantiKoha
    Koha Community
        New Koha Libraries
        Community Gossip
        Pacific Islands Koha Users Call
    Past Koha Events
        April General IRC Meeting
    Upcoming Koha Events
        May General IRC Meeting
        Symposium Koha 2012
        Koha and Dspace Training in India
        KohaCon12

Koha Development

Koha 3.8.0 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team is happy to announce the release of Koha 3.8.0,
the third major release since we shifted to time based releases. The
release team would like to thank everyone involved in this release for
making it possible.

Koha 3.8.0 contains over 130 enhancements with over 1000 changesets
from 71 developers. Please read the release notes for more
information.

Koha 3.8.0 can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions can be found here or in the INSTALL files
that come in the tarball.

Koha 3.10 Roles
by Chris Cormack

Positions for the Koha 3.10.0 release cycle (due October 2012) were
confirmed at the April general IRC meeting. It is our biggest release
team yet and a really good sign of the health of the community that we
had so many volunteers. The roles are:

    Release Manager : Paul Poulain, France
    Translation Manager: Shared between Samuel Desseaux and Frédéric
Demians both from France
    Translation Assistants: Katrin Fischer, Germany; Marijana Glavica, Croatia
    Documentation Manager: Nicole Engard, USA
    DB Documentation Manager: Nicole Engard, USA
    Quality Assurance (QA) Manager: Ian Walls, USA
    Quality Assurance (QA) Assistants: Marcel de Rooy, Netherlands;
Jonathan Druart, France; Mason James, New Zealand
    Release Maintainer 3.8.x: Chris Cormack, New Zealand
    Release Maintainer 3.6.x: Jared Camins-Esakov, USA
    Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat, New Zealand
    Packaging Assistant: Mason James, New Zealand
    Bug Wrangler: Magnus Enger, Norway; Katrin Fischer, Germany;
Dobrica Pavlinušić, Croatia; Koustubha Kale, India
    Meeting Chair: BWS Johnson, USA

So that’s 17 people in total who have volunteered and been accepted to
positions for the next 6 months (starting after the release of 3.8.0
on April 23). I think it is also great we have a nice geographic
spread, especially the bug wrangler team.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, statistician par excellence, has posted bug statistics
for March and statistics for Koha 3.8.0.

Adding Browse Headings to Koha Using Solr
by Stefano Bargioni

The Library of the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome
added browse headings to Koha. This is perhaps the first example of
integration of Koha and Solr in a production environment. Users can
scan lists of authors (established or unestablished forms), titles,
title series, author/title, uniform titles, subjects, etc.

An engine written in Perl runs on a regular basis to synchronize Solr
entries with Koha data. The process is driven by an xml config file
where chosen tags and subfields of authority or bibliographic records
are described in order to feed one or more lists for browsing. More
than 500,000 entries were generated, starting from about 111,000
authority records and 147,000 biblio records.

Browse search was added at the top of “Browse by Subject” page; see
http://catalogo.pusc.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-authorities-home.pl.

This topic will be presented exhaustively at KohaCon12 in Edinburgh.

SemantiKoha
by Magnus Enger

Recently, there has been a fair amount of discussion about
RDF/Semantic Web technologies being central to the efforts to replace
the MARC family of “standards”, including from the US Library of
Congress [1]. However, there has not been much testing of these
technologies in the context of actual ILSes. I aim to do something
about that with my “SemantiKoha” project. The goal is to explore how
openly available semantic/linked data can be used in the Koha OPAC to
enhance the user experience and aid in discovery. The practical work
is at a very early proof-of-concept stage, but there is a live demo
available [2] and the source code is also available [3]. If anyone
wants to join the fun and contribute please don’t hesitate to contact
me!

[1] http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-051311.html and
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-103111.html.

[2] http://semantikoha.libriotech.no/. See, for example, the page for
Charles Darwin:
http://semantikoha.libriotech.no/cgi-bin/koha/opac-view.pl?uri=http://data.deichman.no/person/darwin_charles.

[3] https://github.com/MagnusEnger/semantikoha. See especially the
README, which explains how the demo is set up:
https://github.com/MagnusEnger/semantikoha/blob/master/README.txt.
Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

    Middletown Township Public Library (via ByWater Solutions)
    Wilderness Coast Public Libraries (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Owen Leonard has revisited the process of customizing OPAC cart and
lists buttons, this time using CSS3 features.

Adalid Ortiz reports that Biblioteca Loyola of the Universidad
Iberoamericana Tijuana in Mexico has published an online manual in
Spanish for their Koha OPAC. They previously published an online
manual in Spanish on cataloging with Koha.

Matt Adams has posted an update on LibLime’s application for the New
Zealand Koha trademark.

Pacific Islands Koha Users Call
by Pam Bidwell, University of the South Pacific

I would like to hear from users of Koha in the Pacific Islands.

Many small Pacific countries struggle with extra issues when
automating their libraries, such as unexpected power outages (and
damaging power surges), intermittent and slow Internet access, old
technology and limited IT expertise. For many Pacific libraries, Koha
is their first automated system, and staff training is a real issue.
Quite a few Pacific Koha projects have stalled as a result of these
problems.

We need to develop a supportive local community that shares knowledge
and offers support.

I hope to set up a smaller discussion forum for the Pacific Koha
community (while still being involved in the wider Koha community
discussions). The forum will talk about day to day use of Koha, answer
basic questions about using the system and share resources such as
training materials. I would also like to discuss regional training
possibilities.

Please email me at pamela.bidwell(at)usp.ac.fj if you would like to be involved.
Past Koha Events

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting was held on 4 April 2012.

More info, including the agenda and links to the minutes, is here.
Upcoming Koha Events

May General IRC Meeting

The May general IRC meeting will be held on Wednesday, 2 May 2012.

More info is here.

Symposium Koha 2012

Symposium Koha 2012 will be held at BULAC in Paris 14-15 May 2012. The
symposium will be a forum for exchange and meetings between Koha
users, future users, and providers. More info is here.

Koha and Dspace Training in India

Two-day Koha training and certification workshops are being offered in
Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. More info is here.

Three-day Koha and Dspace training and certification workshops are
being offered in Mumbai and Bangalore. More info is here.

KohaCon12

KohaCon12 will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 5-7 June 2012. A
hackfest will be held 9-11 June.

This is a free conference for everyone interested in the Koha library
system. There is no registration fee, but attendees are asked to
pre-register.

The organizers are seeking sponsors to help defray the cost of the
conference. Sponsors so far include Tamil, PTFS Europe, Catalyst,
Libriotech, Projektlink Konsult, and The Galecia Group. Information on
sponsorship is here.

More details on the conference can be found here.