[Koha] How many Koha libraries are there worldwide?

[Marshall Breeding]

I generally agree with the Catalyst that the number of implementations around the world is something in the 15,000 range.  I often mention in my talks that it is likely that Koha is the most implemented ILS globally.  I would like to be able to better document this assertion.  I know that there are many Koha implementations missing from the libraries.org directory I maintain.  I've mentioned this before, but any help the Koha community could lend in registering libraries using Koha in the directory would be very useful and would help bring recognition to its global impact. 

-marshall


Marshall Breeding
Editor, Library Technology Guides
www.librarytechnology.org
Marshall.breeding at librarytechnology.org
twitter.com/mbreeding




-----Original Message-----
From: Koha [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Kathryn Tyree
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2016 10:29 PM
To: mik at adminkuhn.ch
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] How many Koha libraries are there worldwide?

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
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