Archive for March, 2010

KohaCon2010 Roadtrip

March 30th, 2010

The purpose of this post is to provide links to flesh out the itinerary of the roadtrip from Auckland to Wellington for the Koha Conference 2010.

Day 1:  Friday 22nd Oct

Arrive at Auckland International Airport.

Transport into the city hotel is easy. Just go outside and head over the carpark to the waiting shuttle vans and taxis. If you are on your own a shuttle van is heaps cheaper, they run often and will take you to the door of the hotel, otherwise grab a taxi.

We have a nights accommodation at the Mercure Hotel in the city.  If you are arriving before this night we can book you extra nights if you like.  Its not top of the range but is perfectly adequate and lets face it, you’ll be so tired you’ll sleep anywhere :) Accommodation is on a share twin basis.

Dinner in town at one of the Viaduct harbour restaurants, venue of the America’s Cup series. We can easily stroll here from the hotel.

Day 2:  Saturday 23rd Oct

We’ll collect the rental van, load up the trailer and head south, stopping at Tirau which is a groovy little Kiwi town with great coffee.

We’ll arrive in Rotorua around 1pm or so, depending on how much we dawdle along the way.  We head over to Te Puia for the Te Po combo experience at 4.15 so you will have time for a snooze or a swim in the thermal hot pools  at the Rydges Hotel (make sure you bring your swim suit).

Day 3:  Sunday 24th Oct

9am Drive south to Wellington, stopping briefly at Huka Falls before turning off to Mokai Gravity Canyon for optional activities like bungy jumping and the flying Fox. These are both adrenaline filled Kiwi adventures. Bungy is where you fall off  a very high bridge into a river with only an elastic band around your ankle, and the flying fox is where 1 – 3 people are strapped into a harness and then fly through the air along a cable above a canyon – really really fast.  Not for the faint hearted.

We head south for another couple of hours, grab a quick ice cream at Levin (we make the best icecreams) and then on down to Wellington for the Conference.

Costs: looking like $270 per person but will confirm exact costings once final quotes have been received and we know who wants twin rooms and who wants to sleep by themselves (because they snore like tractors!).

Call for April 2010 Koha Newsletter Articles

March 30th, 2010

It’s that time again, time to gather up all your Koha news (big and small) and send them to me for publication in our next issue of the Koha Newsletter. Articles can be as short as 1 line and as long as 20 (with links to read more content). They should include news about your Koha library, features you’re working on, tips & tutorials you want to share. In short the sky’s the limit. Please email me your articles by the 12th of April so that I can edit everything and get it organized for the April 15th release.

Past newsletters can be found here: http://koha-community.org/category/koha-newsletter/ and you can subscribe to updates via RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/KohaNewsletter.

Koha open day in the UK

March 30th, 2010
April 23, 2010
10:00 amto5:00 pm

The Kings Fund and CAMLIS are pleased to announce that we will be holding a free open day for people interested in finding more about implementing or switching to Koha. The event will be held in the morning of Friday 23rd of April at CAMLIS. The morning will run as follows:

10:00 Welcome and refreshments
10:15 Ray Phillips (Head of Information & Service Development) and or Matthew Hale (Systems Development Librarian) from the Kings Fund will give an overview of implementing Koha
10:30 Gerhard Bissels (Library Manager) from Camlis will discuss issues in the selection process
10:45 Break and a chance to ask questions and see Koha in action
11:15 A member of the Kings Fund team (to be confirmed) will talk about practical issues of cataloguing
11:30 Andrea Chandler (Librarian) from Camlis will discuss issues around support and customisation
11:45 Q&A

Places for this event are limited so please book early.
If this open day model is successful we will repeat it at a later date, so do register your interest even if you can’t necessarily make this day.

Register interest by emailing Andrea Chandler a.chandler@camlis.eu

Konkan area union catalogue passes 500 thousand marc records

March 30th, 2010

Ratnagiri (Dist.) Nagar Vachanalaya has joined Granthalaya.org
With this the Granthalaya.org union catalogue has crossed the half million mark with over 536,600 books catalogued so far..

http://www.granthalaya.org/ is a project which intends to create bibliographic union database of holdings of all the public libraries in Konkan area including Thane. With the addition of this library that brings the total number of participating libraries to 13, and counting …

OSS-ILS Survey

March 27th, 2010

Via LISNews:

As part of an IMLS funded Early Career Research Grant, Dr. Vandana Singh (Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences at University of Tennessee-Knoxville) is working on a 3 year research project that will compare the technical support for Open Source Integrated Library Systems with proprietary Integrated Library Systems.

In this active phase 1 of this research project, we are collecting data regarding the expectations of librarians for technical support and the available channels of technical support. We will identify the expectations of librarians about technical support for ILS (both open source software and proprietary software).

At this stage, we are looking for participants interested in contributing to this study. If you would be willing to participate in the study that would be greatly appreciated. You can take the survey and find more information at: http://oss-research.cci.utk.edu/. You can also direct any queries or suggestions to utk.ils.research@gmail.com with “ILS Survey” in the subject line.

Ada Lovelace day

March 24th, 2010

Today is Ada Lovelace day, Ada Lovelace was one of the worlds first programmers and March 24th has been set aside to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. You can read more about the day here. So I think this is the perfect day to thank some of the women who have helped make Koha what it is today.

Here are some that stick out in my mind

  • Rosalie Blake and Joann Ransom from Horowhenua Library Trust who, as people involved with Koha all know, were the driving force behind Koha.
  • Then there is Rachel Hamilton-Williams the owner of Katipo Communicatons without whom there would be no Koha.
  • Olwen Williams – One of the original developers and the person who did all the hard work doing the first Koha migration ever.
  • Brooke Helman – Who wrote the first newbie guide to Koha, and deployed Koha with no support company help.
  • Irma Birchall – Owner of Calyx and champion of Koha and software freedom in Australia
  • Nicole Engard – Documentation manager and bug fixer.
  • Jane Wagner, Liz Rea, Katrin Fischer – All have committed patches to Koha in the last 3 months.

Then of course there are the hundreds of other women involved in the community. Koha is lucky to have you all.

April Monthly Community Handover IRC Meeting

March 22nd, 2010
April 6, 2010
7:00 pmto8:00 pm

The next Community Handover Koha IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday, 6 April 2010 at 19:00 UTC+0 in the Koha IRC channel. Add your agenda items to the official meeting wiki page.

April Monthly General IRC Meeting

March 22nd, 2010
April 7, 2010
10:00 am

The next general Koha IRC meeting will take place on Wednesday, 7 April at 10:00 UTC+0 in the Koha IRC channel. Add your agenda items to the official meeting wiki page.

Koha Newsletter: Volume 1/Issue 3: March 2010

March 15th, 2010

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 1, Issue 3: March 2010

Table of Contents

Continue reading “Koha Newsletter: Volume 1/Issue 3: March 2010” »

Koha Bugsquashing on March 9th

March 5th, 2010
March 9, 2010

Join us on the #Koha IRC Chanel on Tuesday, March 9th for a bugsquashing event. The event is all day – no matter what your timezone! This will get us one step closer to releasing Koha 3.2 beta. In preparation, check our list of all open bugs to see if any of the bugs you reported can be closed – this will save us from looking at bugs that have been resolved already.