[Koha] How many Koha libraries are there worldwide?

[Kathryn Tyree]

Hi Michael, and all,

Catalyst say "around 15,000" lately, and feel pretty confident that this
is still a conservative number. Why?

As Michael said, many libraries choose not to report anywhere that they
use Koha, or might not think to do it, and the project does not make it
compulsory. We know this looking at
http://www.librarytechnology.org/lwc-processquery.pl?ILS=Koha because we
can see gaps where many countries that have strong/prolific Koha
communities are not well-represented. It's an English-speaking website -
some Koha libraries may be unable to access it or have no reason to
engage with it.

Liz Rea who runs koha-community.org in her own time (thank you Liz) just
let me know that there were 2684 unique visits to the Koha download
page, from 1-21 August. That's 21 days, 2684/21 = 128 unique visits per
day. Lets multiply that by 365 and we have 46,720 visits in 1 year (they
won't all be unique when we do this based on a 3 week sample, but it's
an indication). Koha has been around for going on 17 years,  and we all
know that the rate of libraries leaving Koha is really really low  :-)

*If* we all reported to hea.koha-community.org we could tell a more
complete story (I'm not pointing the finger, Catalyst don't currently
report all our customers to Hea - I mean to ask them all though!)

We don't know for sure how many libraries in New Zealand use Koha. It's
around 80-100 if you count by physical branches, rather than
organisations. There are 49 items in librarytechnology.org that match
Koha+New Zealand, so NZ is only approx half-reported there, and we speak
ok English ;) There are loads more Koha libraries around the pacific,
often supported out of NZ or Australia.

Best wishes,
Kathryn




On Tue, 2016-08-23 at 01:45 +0200, Michael Kuhn wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I wonder how many libraries worldwide are using Koha.
> 
> At the moment Marshall Breedings wonderful website libraries.org lists 
> 4'352 libraries using Koha:
> * http://www.librarytechnology.org/lwc-processquery.pl?ILS=Koha
> 
> I always thought there are about 4'000 or meanwhile even 6'000 libraries 
> using Koha, since of course not everyone is listing their library in 
> libraries.org.
> 
> But today I was thrilled to find the number of "around 15'000" Koha 
> libraries in an article by Catalyst:
> * https://www.catalyst-eu.net/news/koha-introduction-courses
> 
> Does anyone have other numbers? Or does anyone have the approximate 
> numbers for his own country?
> 
> For Austria, Germany and Switzerland I try to find every Koha library, 
> these are the current numbers (http://adminkuhn.ch/wiki/Koha/Anwender), 
> but not counting library branches:
> 
> * Austria: 7
> * Germany: 37
> * Switzerland: 7
> 
> Best wishes, Michael