LISolutions in collaboration with Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of Pakistan (ICMAP), The University of Waikato, New Zealand and Digital Library Network of South Asia (DLNetSA) is organizing a Three Days Training on Free & Open Source Integrated Library Systems (ILS)

Introduction: Free and Open Source Movement has provided great opportunities for library community around the globe. This training will consist of hands-on practical sessions on the following Free and Open Source Software (FOSS):

• Koha ILS (Latest Version)
• Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL)
• DSpace (A favorite Digital Library Suite)

Important Documents for Registration and Nominations:

• Training Brochure
• Online Registration Form
• PDF Registration Form
• Invitation/Nomination Letter for HODs

Event details are as under:

Title: Three Days Training on Free & Open Source Integrated Library Systems (ILS)
Date: May 17-19 2012
Venue: ICMAP Campus, Plot No. 16, Sector H-9, Islamabad, Pakistan

View Larger MapOrganizers:

• LISolutions Pakistan
• Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of Pakistan (ICMAP)
• The University of Waikato, New Zealand
• Digital Library Network of South Asia (DLNetSA)

Training Team:

• Mr. Ata ur Rehman (Team Lead)
• Mr. Zahid Iqbal
• Mr. M. Shafiq Rana

Organizing Coordinator:

• Mr. Zahid Iqbal
  kashan.zahid@yahoo.com
  +92 331 504 4430

Training Fee: PKR 5000/- (US $ 60 for foreign participants )

Fee includes:
Koha, GSDL, DSpace DVD, Training Kit, LISolutions’ Membership, Certificate, Lunches/Refreshment

How to Register?:

Deposit training fee online and get the payment slip. Then get registered here.

Online Registration

Account Title: LISolutions Trust
A/C No: 0541001951005064
Bank: MCB F-7 Markaz, Islamabad -44000

Important Note: As we have limited seats available, interested participants are requested to get registered on first come first serve basis according to following procedure:

Training Outcomes:
After successful completion of this training the participants will be able to:

• Deploy / Install Koha on your own computer /server
• Learn basic commands of Linux which may be helpful to use Koha and other FOSS software more
• Effectively Configure / customize Koha according to your needs
• Learn the practical use of GSDL and DSpace

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

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.

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

Koha 3.8.0 can be downloaded from download.koha-community.org or at this direct link

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world.

The website for the Koha project is

http://koha-community.org/

Koha 3.8.0 can be downloaded from:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.08.00.tar.gz

Installation instructions can be found at:

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Installation_Documentation

  OR in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball

Koha 3.8.0 is a major feature release, that comes with a lot of new features, and many tweaks to improve performance. Those tweaks are usually not activated by default when you install Koha. If you're upgrading, they are not activated. Go the the "PERFORMANCE" chapter to see all of those improvements, and how to activate them.

NEW FEATURES

==========

There are 130+ enhancements in Koha 3.8. Some of them are minor, some are major. The list is given below. The number in () is the bugzilla number (http://bugs.koha-community.org) The "IMPORTANT" flag before an enhancement description means it's a totally new feature, or a major improvement of an existing one, or a change that you should be warned, because you'll spot it in your daily use of Koha

CATALOGUE and CATALOGUING
  * IMPORTANT Add ability to take book cover images from local img db (1633)
      This feature let you attach images to bibliographic records, that can be cover images or any kind of image
  * Delete biblios if deleting all their items in batch deletion (6027)
      When you do batch deletion, you can check a checkbox to automatically delete biblios that have no more items attached. The previous behaviour is still there (do not delete the biblio), and the checkbox not checked by default
  * Choose framework on Merge (6210)
       When you merge 2 bibliographic records, you can choose the framework of the merged record
  * Attach/move items - adding option "try again" after success or wrong barcode (6323)
  * Enhanced Workflow for adding analytical records (6831)
      In cataloguing after searching for the parent record the new tool bar option 'add child' takes you into the addbiblio screen but with the Host Item Tag already populated with data derived from the parent record
  * Adding invoice number and vendor name to the moredetail page (7235)
      When a biblio is created through an acquisition order, the vendor name and invoice number is displayed, and linked to the order
  * In the items table, make items.materials of type text, and show its contents at circulation (7278)
      The note in the item field mapped to items.materials will show up in a message box when checking the item in or out.
  * New call number allocation plugin (7458)
      When you activate this new plugin (callnumber-KU), the callnumber has the following behaviour:
      FREN 0 (then click on ...) - FREN 0000 is returned
      FREN 0 (then click on ...) - FREN 0001 is returned (the first unused value beginning with this prefix)
      FREN 01 (then click on ...) - FREN 0100 is returned
      FEAT AM (then click on ...) - FEAT AM01 is returned
      FEAT AM (then click on ...) - FEAT AM02 is returned
  * Create index for items.itemcallnumber (7509)
      This index speed up a lot the shelves browsing feature
  * OCLC Connexion Gateway, including extension svc/import_bib (7613)
  * Add auto-completion on auth_finder (7400)
  * 5 icons have been added to bridge itemtype icon theme (7373)
  * A minor change in the “GetMarcAuthors”  function of C4/Biblio.pm would allow differentiate the type of authors in the templates (4376)
  * Add search links in detail pages (6120)
  * IMPORTANT Authority matching improvements (7284)
          Implemented new C4::Linker functionality to make it possible to easily add
          custom authority linker algorithms. Currently available linker options are:
          * Default: retains the current behavior of only creating links when there is
            an exact match to one and only one authority record; if the 'broader_headings'
            option is enabled, it will try to link to headings to authority records for
            broader headings by removing subfields from the end of the heading (NOTE:
            test the results before enabling broader_headings in a production system
            because its usefulness is very much dependent on individual sites' authority
            files)
          * First Match: based on Default, creates a link to the *first* authority
            record that matches a given heading, even if there is more than one
            authority record that matches
          * Last Match: based on Default, creates a link to the *last* authority
            record that matches a given heading, even if there is more than one record
            that matches

OPAC
  * IMPORTANT XSLT systempreference should take a path to file rather than YesNo (4032)
      You can now display biblio detail and search results using a XSLT taken from a file. It means you can have a XSLT that is independant from the one provided by Koha. You can still choose to display using normal mode or the default XSLT provided
  * Add ID attribute to certain areas of OPAC so jquery can be used to hide them (4819)
  * IMPORTANT Star ratings in the opac (5668)
      You can now activate (through a system preference) local rating in the OPAC. Logged-in users can rate any biblio
  * IMPORTANT Display information about library on OPAC detail (7264)
      In libraries administration, there is a new field that, if filled, is displayed on the OPAC when the patron put his mouse over library name. This can be used to enter library opening hours, address,...
  * System preference to configure export options for OPAC detail page (7392)
      The new system preference allows to give a list of | separated values to define, which download options are offered in OPAC. You can choose between BIBTEX (bibtex), Dublin Core (dc), MARCXML (marcxml), MARC-8 encoded MARC (marc8), Unicode/UTF-8 encoded MARC (utf8), Unicode/UTF-8 encoded MARC without local use (9xx, x9x, xx9) fields and subfields (marcstd), MODS and RIS
  * Add ISSN to SearchForTitleIn (7576)
      The placeholder {ISSN} is now available in SearchForTitleIn systempreference (as title, author, isbn were previously)
  * Introduce sys pref to control 'browse results' in OPAC (7935)
      A system preference has been added to activate or desactivate the "browse result" feature (that let you move to the next/previous record when you've made a search)
  * "Add to Cart" changes to "Remove from Cart" when a record already in the cart is checked (3215)
  * comments shouldn't show patron's full name (5503)
  * Babeltheque integration (7470)
      Babeltheque is a french provider for enhanced content (comments, reviews,...). The basic support available in previous versions has been improved a lot.
  * social networks links (7470)
      You can activate a system preference that will display Facebook 'I like', google+ '+1', linkedIn and some other social networks links. (Note that the system preference OPACBaseURL must be filled in order to have this feature working correctly)

ACQUISITION
  * Linking suggestions & orders (5346)
      You can now jump from a suggestion to the order placed or from the order to the suggestion it comes from
  * IMPORTANT keep track of cancelled orders (5358)
      When you cancel an order, it does not disappear, but is displayed in a table below the other orders
  * Create new budget from a copy of a previous budget (6943)
  * Claim notice in acquisitions is now using the message queue (7103)
  * Claims/Late orders in acquisitions give feedback (7104)
  * Modify order notes when basket is closed (7166)
      When a basket is closed, you still can update an order notes. This will let you, for example, add a comment about a delay for delivery
  * Change booksellers search results display (7169)
      The page displayed when you search for a bookseller has been changed a lot for a better readability
  * edition statement field (7289)
      The edition statement field has been added to the order form
  * IMPORTANT claims management improvement (5347)
      When you claim a late order, the date of the last claim and the total number of claims is now saved and displayed
  * IMPORTANT new fields in vendor table (7293 and 7291)
      There is now a field to store the common delivery time. It is used to calculate estimated delivery when placing an order, and displayed in acquisition claims. There is also a field containing the library customer number at the vendor
  * IMPORTANT display suggestions from librarian library only by default (7300)
      By default, the librarian sees only the suggestions placed by patrons from his library
  * Add default date limit to acquisitions histsearch (7301)
  * Suggestion show page (7577)
      There is now a page to display a suggestion, that is used when jumping from order to suggestion
  * Use of date filters on bookseller pages (7737)
  * When adding Vendor default to active currencies (4161) 

PATRONS
  * The patron password is masked as it is entered (5280)
  * Display Organisation and Parent Organisation names when viewing a borrower of type organisation (6303)
  * Link in readingrec.pl to export a barcode file (6751)
  * A system preference has been added to renew membership from expiry date or from current date (6843)
  * Clean up interface on fine payment screens (7080)
  * IMPORTANT Group borrower attributes and link between patron category and attribute (7154)
      In patron extended attributes, you can now:
        - group patron attributes, in a PA_GROUP authorised value list.
        - select a patron category for a give attribute. If you choose one, only patrons of this category will have this attribute available and displayed
  * IMPORTANT Add ability search borrowers only on email / phone (7544)
      In patron search, you can choose on which field you're doing your search:
        - standard (the default option, the previous one : search on patron card, then name+surname)
        - email
        - borrowernumber (Koha internal number)
        - phone
  *  Custom field removal from patron entry screens (6190)
      The systempreference BorrowerUnwantedField (same format as BorrowerMandatoryField) implement a mechanism for removing unwanted fields from the entry screens

SERIALS
  * Partial duplication of a subscription (5354)
      A syspref has been added that you can use to define fields that should not be duplicated when you duplicate a subscription
  * Add a 1/4 month frequency (6321)
  * The hardcoded routing list note is now a system preference (7557)

CIRCULATION
  * IMPORTANT Hourly loans (5549)
      issuing rules can now be defined in hour unit, enabling daily/hourly loans
  * Make fields from issues table available in overdues (5607)
  * IMPRTANT Offline circulation improvements : Firefox plugin, and upload all files, apply at once (5877)
      You can download a Firefox plugin (https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/koct/), that will let you do offline circulation when your network is down. When the network is back, you can upload all KOCT files from your circulation desks, and apply all of them at once.
  * Adds staticfines.pl for static fines processing (6858)
      This script let you define static fine like "when the patron is late, set a fixed fine of 1€ for each book late"
  * IMPORTANT User Configurable Slips (7001)
      - Slips and checkout reciepts are now driven under the notices editor.
      - The Notice for a given event can be defined for all libraries, or library by library
      - You can define a CSS to format the notices (see systempreferences)
  * Floating collection (7144)
      Adds support for Floating Collections (i.e. items that don't automatically return home when checked in at another branch) on a per branchcode/itemtype basis.
  * Display of issue number for serials in overdues (7434)
  * Printing Transfer Slips for checkin items that do not have holds but need transfer (7467)
  * Display fine amount and make payment link during checkin (7566)
  * add columns to overdues export (4051)
  * Double-clicking the 'place hold' button can result in duplicate holds (4054)
  * Suspension of holds (7641)
      Users are now able to place a hold 'on suspension'.  This means the hold will preserve it's place in the queue, but it will be skipped over to the next non-suspended hold when the item becomes available.  Upon un-suspension, the hold will resume it's original place in the queue.
  * Expire holds that have been waiting too long (7408)
      For holds that have been waiting for pickup longer than the ReservesMaxPickupDelay number of days, there is now an automated way to mark these holds as "expired" (misc/cronjobs/holds/expire_holds_over.pl).
  * Cancel all waiting holds (6039)
      There is now a button to cancel all waiting holds and an option to choose to cancel or not hold needing a transfer when clicking on this cancel all button
  * Add "AllowItemsOnHoldCheckout" syspref to allow issue to the patron regardless of hold status (7090)
      An item scanned at a self check station connected to Koha over SIP2 can generate an issue regardless of whether there is a hold on the item. If the patron has the book in hand, they should be allowed to check it out; otherwise, what's to stop them from just taking it?
  * Add system pref to control behavior of submitting empty barcode field on circulation page (7077)
      It used to be that submitting an empty barcode input field when a patron's account was open in Circulation would clear the page (the same behavior as the "clear screen" buton offers now). Since inclusion of Bug 4389 this action has been co-opted to pop up a quick slip print window. A system preference has been added to allow the library to choose which behavior they want.

PERFORMANCE (see below for more information about performance)
  * Use memcached cache koha-conf.xml configuration variables (6193)
  * Caching Templates (7511)
  * work on persistency compatibility to make Koha Plack / mod_perl compliant (7172)
  * Enhancing the performance test suite (6015) 

SEARCHING
  * More options for AdvancedSearchTypes (7031)
      Adds the ability to perform advanced searches in both the OPAC and staff client on more than
      a single AdvancedSearchType at a time.  Support included for Itemtype, Collection Code and Shelving Location.

      AdvancedSearchTypes syspref preference is repurposed; no longer a single value, it can now take
      multiple item code fields separated by "|".  The order of these fields will determine the order
      of the tabs in the OPAC and staff client advanced search screens.  Values within the search type
      are OR'ed together, while each different search type is AND'ed together in the query limits.  The
      current stored values are supported without any required modification.

      Each set of advanced search fields are displayed in tabs in both the OPAC and staff client.  The
      first value in the AdvancedSearchTypes syspref is the selected tab; if no values are present, "itemtypes"
      is used.  For non-itemtype values, the value in AdvancedSearchTypes must match the Authorised Value name, and
      must be indexed with 'mc-' prefixing that name.
  * Add ICU option to Koha out of the box (7698)
      during installation, you now have an option to use ICU. ICU is a unicode library that improve a lot zebra search engine for non latin alphabet catalogue

INTERNALS
  * Be stricter with utf-8 output (6752)
  * Have mysql returning errors (7184)
  * Move SIPconfig.xml, sip_run and sip_shutdown outside from C4 (7238)
  * Allow authentication to Koha via PKI / x.509 certificates (6296)
  * Using OPACBaseURL for CAS Authentication (7745)
  * Cleaning up import tables and action_logs   (7240)
      The cleanup_database.pl now can clean imported records and logs
  * Opac-ics depends on Date::ICal which is largely unmaintained (7532)
      the Date::ICal dependancy has been removed
  * Use KohaDates Template::Toolkit plugin to display dates (7743)
      all dates are displayed through a Template::Toolkit plugin, that make the code more readable and maintainable. This change is not visible to users
  * A lot of html div & ids & spans have been added to help with CSS customization (7760, 7781, 7876, and some others)

TOOLS
  * Give option to use description for homebranch/holding branch in label creator instead of the branchcode (7615)
  * It is now possible to export MARC records without private/local fields (7345)
  * It is now possible to duplicate a holiday calendar (7477)
  * It is now possible to mark a range of holiday as closed (7681) 

LISTS
  * a deep work has been started to clean up the code and make it more flexible (7310
      most of this work is invisible for now, but new features will come soon.
      for now, the only visible improvement is the system preference OpacAllowPublicListCreation that let you enable or disable the creation of public lists by patrons

VARIOUS
  * Main page enhanced (7781)
      The search toolbox available on most page has been introduced on the main page for more consistency.
      A "Welcome to Koha" has been added,
      The menus are located at the same position if there is no news or if there is some
  * Improving koha-list and koha-create (6913)
      The biggest change is to add support for pre-determined MySQL credentials using
      a file in /etc/koha/passwd (for security reasons, if you use this feature, make
      sure the file is not world-readable). The configuration file has the following
      format:
      instance:user:password:database
      The database is optional, but the other two are both required if you want to
      specify MySQL credentials. If no credentials are specified for a given instance,
      the standard koha_instance username and an auto-generated password are used.

      The following additional command line options are now available:
      * --use-db - use a pre-existing database, see also --database
      * --database - specify the name of the mysql database (still defaults to
        koha_instance)
      * --passwdfile - specify a custom (Koha) passwd file for MySQL credentials

      The following additional variables are now available (for use in
      koha-sites.conf or a custom config file):
      * OPACPORT (previously added but not documented) - port on which the OPAC
        should be served
      * OPACPREFIX - prefix for the OPAC's virtual host
      * OPACSUFFIX - suffix for the OPAC's virtual host

      This commit also adds the --keep-mysql option to koha-remove, which, if
      specified, will prevent koha-remove from deleting the database or MySQL user
      when removing an instance.
  * rebuild_zebra.pl now has a --limit option to allow partial re-indexing (7246)
  * a System Preference has been added to select the first day of week (Sunday or Monday) to use in the calendar (OPAC and Intranet) (7261)
  * Koha's OAI-PMH now fully support sets (6440)
  * Provide datepicker for sql reports runtime parameters (5698)
  * Installation might fail it user web doesn't have in its path the database command path (6008)
  * Script to recreate entries in the statistics table from the issues and oldissues table (6025)
  * Set a timeout to z3950 servers that could have network problems occasionally (6140) 

PERFORMANCE

==========

A lot of work has been made to improve Koha performance. Some of those improvements are available for everybody in any situation (like database connexion that has been speeded by 200ms (7188) However, the 3 most important speed improvements requires a tweaking of your configuration file

TEMPLATE CACHING
  Without the tweak, templates are compiled everytime you call them. It means that, when you call circulation.pl page, the circulation template is read, parsed and analysed before being filled. The read/parsing/analysis need to be done only once.
  Fortunately, Template::Toolkit is a great tool and provide a caching mechanism: the read/parsing/analysis phase is made only once and the result is stored on your server, at a location defined in your koha configuration file. To activate the caching you must:
      - open koha-conf.xml
      - search for the <config> part of the file
      - add a line <template_cache_dir>/tmp</template_cache_dir>
      - that's all folks&nbsp;!
  Of course, the /tmp directory is at your choice, you can use whatever directory you want. The directory you choose will be filled with files under path/to/koha/koha-tmpl/... (so, if you choose /tmp for template caching and your Koha is installed on /usr/opt/koha, you'll have /tmp/usr/opt/koha/koha-tmpl/...) The size of those files on the disk is less than 5MB
  The performance improvement is a rough 10%, so it's worth it

MEMCACHE
  Memcache is a global caching mechanism that we use for caching almost static data that are retrieved from mySQL. It has been introduced in previous versions of Koha, but it has been upgraded in this release. Previously, the memcache configuration was in the Koha configuration. The consequence was that it was not possible to cache the configuration file itself.
  In Koha 3.8, the memcache configuration is now in the Apache setting. If you're upgrading from a previous version, you must update your configuration, or the memcache won't work anymore.
  To activate memcache:
      * install memcached server (apt-get install memcached). You should not need to update the memcached configuration file, the default values are OK, but it may be worth reading it, to let him use more memory or listen on a different unix port
      * update your koha-httpd.conf file, and add the following lines:
        <memcached_servers>127.0.0.1:11211</memcached_servers>
        <memcached_namespace>KOHA</memcached_namespace>
      Note that, if you have more than one Koha instance on your server, you *must* have a different namespace for each. Otherwise, the'll all share the same cached values, and you'll get some unexpected behaviour&nbsp;!!!
      DISCLAIMER = the memcache mechanism read cached values only once every 10 minuts. So, if you change some parameter that is cached (like cataloguing frameworks), you'll have to wait up to 10 minuts before seing the changes when cataloguing. You've been warned. In future versions, we plan to add a more efficient caching mechanism that will update the cache when it's needed, but for now, just wait. At your option, you also can restart memcache (sudo /etc/init.d/memcached restart) or flush the cache (echo "flush_all" | /bin/netcat -q 2 127.0.0.1 11211)
  The performance improvement is a rought 10%, mostly due to configuration caching (reading and parsing the XML on each page is costly)

PERSISTENCY
  Since version 1, Koha run on the webserver in CGI mode. This mode is not the most efficient we can have. We made a lot of changes on the code to make it persistency compliant. The OPAC is safely run under Plack mode in production in Lyon 3 university and a few other early testers. The staff interface is still considered as experimental, but if you want to help us polishing and make it stable, you're welcomed to try it.
  Setting up Plack result in a huge performance boost. The speed of most pages is multiplied by 3&nbsp;! It means that a page computed in 1.8s will be computed in 0.6s under Plack.
  If you want to activate Plack, head to the wiki page: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack
  If you want to activate Plack for staff, we strongly suggest to be (or become) a subscriber of koha-devel mailing list (the Koha developers one), and announce there that you're running Plack for staff&nbsp;!

System Preferences

==========

The following system preferences have been added or changes (the number in () is the bugzilla number)

* OpacBrowseResults (7935)
* OpacStarsRating (5668)
* OPACXSLTDetailsDisplay, OPACXSLTResultsDisplay, XSLTDetailsDisplay and XSLTResultsDisplay (4032)
* AutoResumeSuspendedHolds (7641)
* Babeltheque_url_js and Babeltheque_url_update (7470)
* SocialNetworks (7470)
* OpacAllowPublicListCreation and OpacAllowSharingPrivateLists (7310)
* UseICU (7092) Be carefull that this syspref can be changed, but only in conjunction with zebra configuration files
* OAI-PMH:AutoUpdateSets (6440)
* AllowPKIAuth (6296)
* RoutingListNote (7557)
* CalendarFirstDayOfWeek (7261)
* ExpireReserveMaxPickupDelay and ExpireReserveMaxPickupDelayCharge (7408)
* NoticeCSS and SlipCSS (7001)
* AutoCreateAuthorities, LinkerModule, LinkerOptions, LinkerRelink, LinkerKeepStale, CatalogModuleRelink (7284)
* OpacPatronimages (3516)
* ShowReviewer is now none|full|first|surname|firstandinitial|username instead of yes/no (5503)
* TransferWhenCancelAllWaitingHolds (6039)
* OpacExportOptions (7392)
* AllowItemsOnHoldCheckout (7090)
* BorrowerRenewalPeriodBase
* OPACLocalCoverImages, LocalCoverImages, AllowMultipleCovers (1633)
* CircAutoPrintQuickSlip (7077)
* BorrowerUnWantedField (6190)

System requirements

==========

Installation

==========

You can install Koha from:

* the tag.gz provided, see INSTALL and INSTALL.debian (even if you're not using debian. There are some usefull hints here)
* git repository. Download Koha from git.koha-community.org, and checkout branch 3.8.x or tag 3.8.0
* debian package, that will be provided soon (check http://koha-community.org for announcement)

Upgrading

==========

If you have a Koha already running, you must take care of the following changes:

  * The SIP start and shutdown scripts and configuration file have been moved from C4 directory to misc/bin, Update your system or your SIP server won't work anymore
  * The cleanup_database.pl script has 2 new options, to clean-up imported records and logs, update your crontab&nbsp;:
      --import DAYS      purge records from import tables older than DAYS days.
                         Defaults to 60 days if no days specified.
      --logs DAYS        purge entries from action_logs older than DAYS days.
                         Defaults to 180 days if no days specified.
  * The Date::ICal dependancy has be removed and a DateTime::Format::ICal has been introduced, update your perl packages on your server&nbsp;!
  * The memcache configuration has been moved from koha conf file to Apache configuration file

Also note that Koha 3.4.x or later no longer stores items in biblio records. If you are upgrading from an older version ou will need to do the following two steps, they can take a long time (several hours) to complete for large databases

misc/maintenance/remove_items_from_biblioitems.pl --run
misc/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl -b -r

Documentation

==========

The Koha manual is maintained in DocBook format. The home page for Koha documentation is

http://koha-community.org/documentation/

As of the date of these release notes, the Koha manual is available:

  english: http://manual.koha-community.org/3.8/en/
  french: http://manual.koha-community.org/3.8/fr/

The Git repository for the Koha manual can be found at

http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=kohadocs.git;a=summary

Translations

==========

Complete or near-complete translations are available in this release for the following languages:
  * French (100%)
  * Spanish (100%)
  * German (100%)
  * Chinese -Taïwan- (97%, OPAC 100%)
  * Italian (86%, OPAC 100%)
  * Danish (81%)
  * Portuguese (79%)
  * French -canada- (76%)
  * English -nz- (76%)
  * Greek (74%)
  * Norwegian (73%)

Note that some strings in online help have been introduced after string freeze, so:
  * the previous number don't count them
  * you'll find some strings in english in online help

Partial (less than 50%) translations are available for various other languages.

The Koha team welcomes additional translations; please see

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Translating_Koha

for information about translating Koha, and join the koha-translate list to volunteer:

http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-translate

The most up-to-date translations can be found at:

http://translate.koha-community.org/

Release Team

==========

The release team for Koha 3.8 is

Release Manager:       Paul Poulain <paul.poulain@biblibre.com>
Documentation Manager: Nicole C Engard <nengard@gmail.com>
Translation Manager:   Frédéric Demians <frederic@tamil.fr>
QA Manager:            Ian Walls <koha.sekjal@gmail.com>
QA team:               Marcel de Rooy <M.de.Rooy@rijksmuseum.nl>, Jonathan Druart <jonathan.druart@biblibre.com>
Bug Wranglers:         Katrin Fischer, Magnus Enger

Release Maintainer (3.4.x): Chris Nighswonger <cnighswonger@foundations.edu>
Release Maintainer (3.6.x): Chris Nighswonger <cnighswonger@foundations.edu>
Release Maintainer (3.8.x): Chris Cormack <chrisc@catalyst.net.nz>

Credits

==========

The following individuals contributed patches to Koha 3.8.0.:
 Paul Poulain
 Owen Leonard
 Katrin Fischer
 Chris Cormack
 Colin Campbell
 Marcel de Rooy
 Dobrica Pavlinusic
 Nicole C. Engard
 Kyle M Hall
 Ian Walls
 Jonathan Druart
 Jared Camins-Esakov
 Adrien Saurat
 Frédéric Demians
 Julian Maurice
 Srdjan Jankovic
 Liz Rea
 Robin Sheat
 Magnus Enger
 Duncan Tyler
 Elliott Davis
 Garry Collum
 Chris Hall
 Frédérick Capovilla
 MJ Ray
 Juan Romay Sieira
 Chris Nighswonger
 Alex Arnaud
 Sam Sanders
 Maxime Pelletier
 Matthias Meusburger
 Sophie Meynieux
 Tomas Cohen Arazi
 Mason James
 Marc Balmer
 Stéphane Delaune
 Henri-Damien Laurent
 D Ruth Bavousett
 Connor Dewar
 Christophe Croullebois
 Zeno Tajoli
 Gaetan Boisson
 Aleksa Vujicic
 Brendan Gallagher
 Marc Veron
 Galen Charlton
 Serhij Dubyk {Сергій Дубик}
 Janusz Kaczmarek
 Salvador Zaragoza Rubio
 Koustubha Kale
 Kate Henderson
 Jono Mingard
 Albert Oller
 Frère Sébastien Marie
 Martin Renvoize
 Peter Lorimer
 Bart Jorgensen
 Jorgia Kelsey
 Lyon3 Team
 James Mason
 Jesse Maseto
 Fridolyn Sommers
 Jon Aker
 Greg Barniskis
 Joy Nelson
 Nahuel Angelinetti

We regret any omissions. If a contributor has been inadvertantly missed, please send a patch against these release notes to koha-patches@lists.koha-community.org.

Revision control notes
==========

The Koha project uses Git for version control. The current development version of Koha can be retrieved by checking out the master branch of

  git://git.koha-community.org/koha.git

The branch for Koha 3.8.x (i.e., this version of Koha and future bugfix releases) is 3.8.x.

Bugs and feature requests

==========

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed at the Koha bug tracker at

http://bugs.koha-community.org/

Location and map: The Melbourne Atheneaum Library 

Moyra McAllister emailed the Koha e-list with the following invitation: "I am a Koha user based in Melbourne, and I know of a few others. At the recent VALA conference held here it was suggested that we form a user group to meet a few times a year to exchange tips and ideas and provide support for newbies. If there is anyone on the list who is interested in this idea could you contact me (off list please). Moyra E-mail: moyrab@internode.on.net"

Moyra is a senior librarian who has many years experience installing and using Koha in several library contexts. We congratulate Moyra on her initiative.  At CALYX, we have wanted to see Koha user groups established in major Australian cities, but preferred to see this done by librarians, not by a support company.  So we are thrilled that that is now occurring with Melbourne the first city to host the 1st Koha user group meeting in Australia. We hope that librarians in other cities will create their own Koha user group too. Moyra also said “As a number of you work in other states, it has been suggested that we could perhaps use Skype for teleconferencing. “ We don't know if this will be possible at this first meeting.

Have you ever noticed in the Koha Release Notes, Maori proverbs like this one? "Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini" It means, 'Success is not the work of one, but the work of many.' The Koha project gains its strength from the community of librarians and support companies.  The Maori word 'Koha' means 'gift': in Maori culture, it is a gift given with some expectation of reciprocity.  Participating in a user group and sharing your experience with others is a great way to give back to the community.

Best wishes, Irma 

Further to my enquiry the skipper said this: “You can fish for mackerel, then for cod and pollok, probably best if there are only 8 or 9 fishing at one time for mackerel as we can get a bit tied up when we hit a shoal! You can bring your own food and drink and we can also take you round the Bass Rock as well to see the amazing gannets and perhaps some seals.”

http://www.charterboats-uk.co.uk/braveheart-northberwick/

Payment and further details will be sorted out when enough people registered.

UPDATE: Please register before 30th April at the latest so arrangements can be made.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

• 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 & Dspace training and certification workshops being offered in Mumbai and Bangalore.

The objectives of this program are to:
- Train library professionals & staff on using Koha/Dspace
- To test and certify their readiness to use the software

This is a 2 day program for Koha and 1 day program on Dspace, covering the key modules and functions in the software. At the end of program, participants will be required to demonstrate their skills on the various modules. Participants who complete 60% of the exercises successfully will be awarded a Basic skills certificate.

Participation fee for the workshops are as follows:
Koha (2 day workshop): Rs. 3,000 per head
Dspace (1 day workshop): Rs. 1,500 per head.

Participants can register in one (Koha or Dspace) of both the programs, as the are on contiguous dates.

The Koha workshops are scheduled as follows:

Mumbai: 27th (Friday) & 28th April (Saturday), 2012
Bangalore: 4th (Friday) & 5th May (Saturday), 2012
Mumbai: 22nd (Friday) & 23rd June (Saturday), 2012
Bangalore: 6th (Friday) & 7th July (Saturday), 2012
Mumbai: 24th (Friday) & 25th August (Saturday), 2012
Bangalore: 31st (Friday) August & 1st September (Saturday), 2012
Mumbai: 19th (Friday) & 20th October (Saturday), 2012
Bangalore: 2nd (Friday) & 3rd November (Saturday), 2012

And the Dspace workshops are scheduled as follows:

Mumbai: 29th (Sunday) April, 2012
Bangalore: 8th July (Sunday), 2012
Mumbai: 26th August (Sunday), 2012
Bangalore: 4th November (Sunday), 2012

For more information including registration details and workshop outline please visit these pages:

http://www.osslabs.biz/koha/training-certification
http://www.osslabs.biz/dspace/training-certification

The call for conference papers is open for this year’s kohacon! 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.

We are particularly keen to receive proposals about archives/special libraries using Koha, Resource Description Framework/Semantic Web/Linked Data and the Koha packages, in both the main conference and the later hackfest.

Please complete the proposal form at http://koha-community.org/kohacon12/ before 20 April 2012.

About KohaCon12

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

This is a free conference for everyone interested in the Koha library system, which is Free and Open Source Software. There is no registration fee, but we will ask that attendees pre-register. Further calls, including calls for registrations and sponsors will be posted soon.

Details (travel, hotels, agenda draft, etc) can be found linked from http://koha-community.org/kohacon12/

KohaCon12 is the fifth KohaCon, following last year’s successful conference in India which brought together users and developers worldwide. KohaCon12 will feature an international slate of speakers (both Koha users and active Koha contributors) conducting presentations and workshops on a diverse range of topics. Talks will cover a range of topics from general experiences of Koha through to technical information on the various modules.

“We expect this event to have wide appeal,” said MJ Ray of host organisation and Koha support provider software.coop. “The conference is for both techies and non-techies. In addition to presentations on the technical side of Koha, the conference will be a demonstration of how users and developers around the world cooperate to improve Free and Open Source Software. software.coop is delighted to host KohaCon in Edinburgh in our tenth anniversary year and this UN International Year of Co-operatives.”

“Koha conferences are always an informative and uplifting event, I have no doubt that this years conference in Edinburgh will be the best conference yet.” said Chris Cormack, one of the original authors of the Koha version 1.0.

About Koha

Koha is the first Free and Open Source Software Integrated Library System (ILS). Gifted by Horowhenua Library Trust and now in use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. The impressive set of features available in Koha continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. Koha has lived up to its name, which means ‘Gift’ in the Maori language of New Zealand.

To learn more about the Koha project, visit: http://koha-community.org

Press Contacts: MJ Ray or ML Edmondson at software.coop +44-844-4437-237

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

Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.6.4 Released
  • Koha 3.8 Status
  • Koha 3.10 Roles
  • Release Manager’s Newsletter
  • Koha Statistics
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • New Zealand Meeting Call
  • Meeting Logs
• Past Koha Events
  • Marseille Hackfest
  • March General IRC Meeting
  • Global Bug Squashing Week
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • April General IRC Meeting
  • KohaCon12

Koha Development

Koha 3.6.4 Released
by Chris Nighswonger

It is with pleasure that I announce the release of Koha 3.6.4.

The package can be retrieved from:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz

You can use the following checksum and signature files to verify the download:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.MD5
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.MD5.asc
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.sig

Release notes for 3.6.4 are at http://koha-community.org/koha-3-6-4.

Koha 3.8 Status

Koha 3.8.0 is scheduled to be released on 23 April 2012.

As of 26 March, 3.8 is in a feature freeze.

Paul Poulain, Koha 3.8 Release Manager, has posted a roadmap to 3.8.

Koha 3.10 Roles
by MJ Ray

With the release of Koha 3.8.0 scheduled for 23 April 2012, it’s time to start thinking about roles for the 3.10 series.

We would like volunteers for:

• Release Manager
• Translation Manager
• Documentation Manager
• Database Documentation Manager
• Quality Assurance (QA) Manager
• Assistant QA Managers
• Specific Module maintainers
• Release Maintainers
• Packaging Manager (and grasshopper)
• Bug Wranglers (the more the merrier!)
• Meeting chair

Anyone who wants take on any of these roles is more than welcome to write their name next to one on the Roles for 3.10 wiki page and perhaps link to their proposal.

The community will vote on these during the April General IRC meeting, 4 April 2012 at 10:00 UTC +0000, straight after the release news.

Please, consider stepping forwards to help lead Koha’s development.

Release Manager’s Newsletter

Paul Poulain, Koha 3.8 Release Manager, is publishing a monthly newsletter dedicated to Koha 3.8 development. It can be found on the Koha Community website in the Koha News category. The fourth issue is here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, statistician par excellence, has posted some recent stats on Koha:

February bug/enhancement statistics
Statistics for Koha 3.6.4

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Columbia County Rural Library District (via ByWater Solutions)
• Kalamaria Public Library (Thessaloniki, Greece) (via Union Catalog of Academic Libraries)
• Plum Creek Library System (via ByWater Solutions)
• Southern NH Library Cooperative (via ByWater Solutions)
• Walla Walla Public Library (via ByWater Solutions)
• Washoe County Library System (via ByWater Solutions)
• Wilderness Coast Public Libraries (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Marc Balmer reports that he has integrated the proprietary arcapos point of sale system with Koha using the SIP protocol. This combination enables the sale of items in the library with seamless integration of fee processing and payment. More info is here.

Stefano Bargioni has developed a Perl script to generate authority records from bibliographic records, which would be useful for migrating data to Koha from an ILS that lacks authority records. You can download the script and get more info here. Stefano would appreciate help with replacing XML::Simple with YAML::Sick and with preparing config files for non-MARC21.

Mysore University Library has implemented a mobile version of their Koha opac.

Kristina D.C. Hoeppner posted to her blog an account of her introduction to squashing bugs during Global Bug Squashing Week.

Vimal Kumar V. has posted a survey to measure adoption and user perceptions of potential Koha users in India.

Chris Cormack tweeted that by upgrading to Koha version 3.6.4, Horowhenua Library Trust, the New Zealand library that sponsored the original development of Koha, is now running a version of Koha containing a contribution by the 14-year-old son of the Trust’s Head of Libraries, Joann Ransom. Chris added that when the original Koha first went live, it also contained a contribution by the son of the Head of Libraries at that time.

Chris has also posted info on using Koha with citation managers Zotero, Endnote, and RefWorks.

New Zealand Meeting Call
by Hannah Benbow

We’re keen for another Koha users group meeting here in New Zealand. If you’d be interested in coming along, let me know so we can get an idea of interest. Contact me on: +64 4 917 6103 or email Hannah.benbow@treasury.govt.nz.

I’ve heard really great things about the last meeting hosted by the Horowhenua Library Trust and would be keen for something similar—an opportunity for users to talk about how to get the best out of Koha and to share their knowledge and ideas.

If there’s enough interest for this to proceed, the Central Agencies Shared Services Information Management team would be happy to host it here at Treasury.

Meeting Logs
by Galen Charlton

Minutes and logs of community meetings that are recorded by MeetBot can now be found at http://meetings.koha-community.org/. I’ve updated all links to meeting minutes on the wiki and instituted a redirect from the previous URL base. I ask any webmasters who link to meeting logs to update their links accordingly.

Past Koha Events

Marseille Hackfest

Paul Poulain has posted an extensive report on the Hackfest that took place in Marseille from 19-25 March.

Gaëtan Boisson posted an earlier report.

March General IRC Meeting

The March general IRC meeting was held on 21 March 2012.

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

Global Bug Squashing Week 2012-03-19
by Magnus Enger

Global bug squashing days are days designated to a concerted effort to get bugs and patches moving along in the right direction. A global bug squashing week is 5 global bug squashing days in a row.

The week of 19-23 March 2012 was a global bug squashing week, coinciding with the Marseille Hackfest. More info is here.

Upcoming Koha Events

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting will be held on Wednesday, 4 April 2012.

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, which is Free and Open Source Software. There is no registration fee, but we will ask that attendees pre-register. Further calls, including calls for papers and registrations will be posted soon.

Details (travel, hotels, agenda draft, etc) can be found linked from here.

KohaCon12 is the fifth KohaCon, following last year’s successful conference in India which brought together users and developers worldwide. KohaCon12 will feature an international slate of speakers (both Koha users and active Koha contributors) conducting presentations and workshops on a diverse range of topics. Talks will cover a range of topics from general experiences of Koha through to technical information on the various modules.

“We expect this event to have wide appeal,” said MJ Ray of host organisation and Koha support provider software.coop. “The conference is for both techies and non-techies. In addition to presentations on the technical side of Koha, the conference will be a demonstration of how users and developers around the world cooperate to improve Free and Open Source Software. software.coop is delighted to host KohaCon in Edinburgh in our tenth anniversary year and this UN International Year of Co-operatives.”

“Koha conferences are always an informative and uplifting event, I have no doubt that this years conference in Edinburgh will be the best conference yet.” said Chris Cormack, one of the original authors of the Koha version 1.0.

A lot of great great great work has been made, I’ll try to report things we made:
As we planned, we splitted in 5 groups, 4 of them focusing on specific hackers topics, the 5th one being librarians testing & translating.

Plack group

(Alex, Matthias, Dobrika and Henri-Damien at the beginning)
this group focused on introducing plack on Koha. A big performance boost was expected from their work.

• Alex, Matthias and Dobrika worked on “plackifying” Koha. The OPAC is already working fine under plack (it’s lived in Lyon3 university, running 3.6, since 3 months)
  A wiki page has been written to show how to integrate plack into Koha setup: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack
• The main problem that has been encountered with the staff interface is described in section 3 of this page: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack#Running_Intranet
  Dobrika worked a lot on writing patches to solve those problems (see bug 7172). He plans to run Koha on plack in production on staff interface next week, so that will be easier to identify any remaining problem !
• The major goal is to be Plack available as an option for Koha 3.8.

Just a comparison (patron search taken as example): generating a page in CGI mode takes 1.12s, and in Plack mode, it takes 0.334s (3 times faster. Yes you’re reading well. Koha is 3 times faster with Plack !)

A second comparison : zebra search: 1.6s for plack and 3s for CGI

A better use of Plack can even be made, and everybody plan to continue the work for 3.10
Just beware that you’re trading speed for memory: plack consumes more memory than CGI: each child running consumes around 60MB of memory, so if you’ve 12 childs (suggested/recommended value), it mean you need aroung 1GB for Plack.

Alex also tried to see how Koha could be fully PSGI compliant, but the tries were not successfull for now.

Ergonomy

(Owen, Katrin, Adrien, Gaetan, Marijana and Julian)

• The group made big lists of things that are inconsistent, ergonomy guidelines,… Some wiki pages have been written.
• the group suggested to use “Add” when we add something to an existing object, and the term “New” when it’s something not related to anything else
• Adrien added header search bar, that is everywhere else on Koha has been introduced in the mainpage (patch submitted)
• Gaetan started to work on a design for the home page, and the staff interface. The goal is to have it for 3.8
• Katrin added id to all pages, as well as a specific css class. It mean we will be able to write a css with different colors for each module (the patch has been pushed, see bug 7760, comment 32 for an example how to use it). The bug 7812 is also related to this improvement, and is about adding a global “header” that include the menu, the header search bar and the breadcrumb, but no code has been submitted yet.
• Owen presented a framework (bootstrap) that could be a replacement for YUI. The interesting point with bootstrap is that it contains all what we need for smartphones. Julian hacked a little bit, and replaced the opac-search.pl.

Database

(Marc, Stéphane and Christophe)

• the group focused on removing mysql-ism
• a first list of mysql-ism has been identified and put on the wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/PostgreSQL.
• the “show column” mysqlism has been removed in a patch submitted on bug
• a generic OO approach has been taken for things that don’t have a generic equivalent.

Solr

(Zeno, Juan, Claire, Jonathan (a little) and Henri-Damien)
The Solr work is a long term work.
All the work the group made is explained in the wiki page : http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Switch_to_Solr_RFC#.23kohahack12

Librarians

The group of french librarians did a great work !

Bugzilla show the following numbers : no patches need to be pushed, 16 patches are waiting for QA, 71 patches are waiting for signoff.

The number of patches needing signoff hasn’t been lowered at first glance. But it’s a wrong feeling ! If you look closer, you’ll discover that :

• 3 patches only had no activity since january
• 6 patches only had no activity since february
• 13 patches haven’t been updated this week but earlier in march.

all other patches still to sign-off had an activity this week.
Around 30 patches have been signed-off.

Those librarians where french, so the french translation of Koha 3.8 have been done, and a large part of the manual has been translated as well.

Conclusion

Last year, everybody was happy of our hackfest. This year, everybody is happy with this hackfest. So next year we will organize another one, you can already ask your boss (for end of march)