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Please forward this to lists or people who will be interested.

KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.

http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/2010/program/

KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.

Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.

If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.

Registration is quick and easy via the website. http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/2010/registration/

We look forward to seeing you in Wellington,

Russel Garlick
on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee

—

What is KohaCon10?

KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.

The conference is split into 2 parts.

The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.

The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.

For more information see our website http://www.kohacon10.org.nz.

We are working on the development of a reference book on library automation and opac 2.0, entitled “Library Automation and OPAC 2.0: Information Access and Services in the 2.0 Landscape.” This book will be published by IGI Global in 2011. We believe that you may be interested in participating, so we encourage you to submit proposals about Koha developments and case studies in accordance with the requirements and the thematic areas set out in
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=10166&copyownerid=12444
or
http://igi-global.com/AuthorsEditors/AuthorEditorResources/CallForBookChapters/CallForChapterDetails.aspx?CallForContentId=4ae6e1c4-904b-4d83-8a4a-9ece2171fccb

Thanks for your attention,

Jesús

Table of Contents

• Tips & Tricks
  • Patron Card Creator Tips
  • Reporting & Patching Koha Bugs
  • Learn Koha through Videos
• Koha in Libraries
  • British Library of Development Studies Implementing Koha
  • Combining open source forces: Koha search block in Moodle
• Koha Events
  • Levin Mayoral Reception and Marae Visit
  • Koha packaging talk at Debconf

Tips & Tricks

Patron Card Creator Tips
by Chris Nighswonger

When uploading images for use with patron cards (including patron images) be sure to provide images at 300ppi (dpi) resolution. These images will be scaled on-the-fly to 72ppi for on-screen display and may look somewhat pixelated there. However, the pdf standard provides for both a “display quality” image and a “print quality” image. When the cards are printed, the “print quality” image (300ppi) will be used and the images will look the same as those uploaded. The short of this is: Don’t use the on-screen images as a judge of the print quality of the image.

When preparing images for use with Koha, you should always begin with a picture of at least 300ppi and dimensions equal to or greater than the finished dimensions you desire. The aspect ratio (width:height) should also remain consistent after editing. If you have an image over 300ppi, scale the ppi first. Then scale the dimensions so that either width or height is the desired finished dimension. You can then crop the other dimension to finish.

Reporting & Patching Koha Bugs
by Nicole C. Engard

Reporting and patching Koha bugs can be a simple process if you follow the many tutorials on the wiki and mailing lists. For those who are all ready to start patching, here are the steps you want to follow:

1. Report a bug (or enhancement)
2. Make yourself the assignee for that bug and change the Status to ‘Assigned’ so that others know you’re working on the bug
3. Write your patch and send it to the patches list
4. Change the bug Importance to ‘PATCH-Sent’ and attach your patch to the bug

Following these simple steps will keep everyone in the loop as you work on and fix bugs/features in Koha.

Learn Koha through Videos
by Nicole C. Engard

Many libraries have been creating videos to help train their staff on Koha. I personally have started a series (that I hope to release once a week) of tutorial videos on Koha 3.2. For more videos check out the Koha channel on YouTube (and feel free to add your videos to the channel if they’re not already there.

Koha in Libraries

British Library of Development Studies Implementing Koha
by Andrew Buxton

The British Library of Development Studies at Brighton, UK is implementing Koha on Debian Linux primarily to run its Z39.50 service. Records will be copied across regularly from Ibex, the library system developed in-house. About one third of the records are for journal articles. Ibex does not use a MARC format so a conversion routine has been developed to produce a text file which is then processed using MarcEdit.

Further information from Andrew Buxton, a.buxton@ids.ac.uk

Combining open source forces: Koha search block in Moodle
by Jonathan Harker

On Saturday 24 July, Wellington Summer of Tech held its 2010 Hackfest – a day of intense coding, soft-drinks and hourly prizes, as a warm up for its Summer of Tech student internship programme at the end of the year, the New Zealand summer.

Brendan Vercoelen from Victoria University worked with Jonathan Harker from Catalyst IT on a Koha search block for the learning management system Moodle, as a first attempt to get these two open source projects to work more closely together. The Koha search block, part of the existing Moodle external search block, allows students and teachers to search by keywords, sends the request to Koha over SRU (Search / Retrieval via URL) and parses and displays the MARCXML results.

The result can be seen in http://www.flickr.com/photos/4nitsirk/4830516298/

This block represents a great kick-off – in the future, we’d like to see a Koha record available as a Moodle resource type, so that (for example) a Moodle course can include a suggested reading list, where the item is fetched from the learning institution’s Koha library system, including its lending status. Previous work by Piers Harding (also at Catalyst) has enabled Moodle and Koha to share single sign-on using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

The Hackfest allowed students to work closely with a mentor on a pre-defined project and gave them the opportunity to learn from experienced programmers. After 5 hours of programming, the students presented their results to the other participants of the Hackfest and invited guests.

Links:

• http://www.summeroftech.co.nz/
• http://www.moodle.org/
• http://www.catalyst.net.nz

Koha Events

Levin Mayoral Reception and Marae Visit
by Kristina Hoeppner

Koha celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. As you know, we will hold this year’s KohaCon in Wellington from 25-27 October 2010, followed by a Hackfest. You still have time to register.

As you will be in the country of the birth of Koha, why not pay a visit to Koha’s proper birthplace? We have planned an exciting trip to Levin, just north of Wellington, where everything started, for 28 October 2010. This excursion does not only give you the opportunity to visit Levin, it’s library, and meet the mayor, but also participate in a powhiri, a traditional Maori welcome ceremony. The Kawiu is a contemporary Marae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marae) and you will be eating in the usual dining room alongside locals. That will give you a real-life experience. You can find the trip details at http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/2010/program/levintrip.html and will have to register by 10 October 2010 for organizational reasons.

Koha packaging talk at Debconf
by Lars Wirzenius

Lars Wirzenius discussed lessons learned from making Debian packages for Koha in a talk at Debconf10. Koha was used as an example of an upstream project to bring up challenges they face when trying to Debian packages made, and things they may improve upon to make their software easier to package. The talk and slides are at http://liw.fi/swimming-upstream/, with videos to become available later.

Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.

Please send future story ideas to

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Table of Contents

• Tips & Tricks
  • Search in Koha
  • Amazon Content Not Appearing?
• Koha in Libraries
  • Koha Users Forum launched in Nigeria
  • Archive & Access Project
• Koha Events
  • Second Koha Open Day in London
  • KohaCon 2010 Program Available

Tips & Tricks

Search in Koha
by Marilen Aretius Corciovei

For people used to web searches and database oriented application Koha way of dealing with searches (since v.3) might seem a bit alien. This is a small set of notes related to some not very obvious questions which I had to answer in order to do some configurations which seemed trivial at the beginning. I am not saying this is wrong or ineffective, just different and different means time to learn. I’m writing this to help you reduce this time. [Read Part 1 & Part 2.]

Amazon Content Not Working?
by Nicole C. Engard

Question: Why is Amazon’s enhanced content not appearing?

Answer: Amazon uses your server time in its API requests and so if your system time is off you will not be able to use Amazon content. Update your server time and make sure all of your Amazon preferences are turned on, this should solve the problem.

Koha in Libraries

Koha Users Forum launched in Nigeria
by Olugbenga Adara

Projektlink Konsult Limited, the premier Koha support company in Nigeria hosted the first ever Koha Users Forum at its premises in Ibadan, Nigeria on Monday June 21, 2010. The event, which had 22 participants from 12 different institutions using Koha in Nigeria, featured tutorials, tips and tricks and discussions on challenges and solutions to problems encountered by the participants while running Koha. More details are available here.

Archive & Access Project
by Savitra Sirohi

The Archive and Access project aims to set up a consortium of archives and libraries in India with the purpose of catalog sharing and eventual sharing of full text digitized resources. The project is supported by the Jamsetji Tata Trust and housed at the Centre or the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.

This will be a union catalog, powered by Koha, of historical collections of libraries and archives from different parts of the India. This is an ongoing process, with the regular introduction of new institutions to the catalog.

The project wishes to solicit contributions from libraries, organizations, historians and other scholars for this catalog. Those interested in participating can contact project members at: publicarchivesindia@gmail.com and more information can be found on the official page.

Koha Events

Second Koha Open Day in London
by Andrea Chandler

The Kings Fund and CAMLIS are pleased to announce that we will be holding another free open day for people interested in finding more about implementing or switching to Koha. All Koha users are also welcome.

The event will be held in the afternoon of Friday 10th of September at CAMLIS, from 2pm-5pm. At the moment we don’t have a strict schedule but we hope to include some short presentations with discussion, followed by hands-on experience in small groups at
the library computers. There will be some time for existing Koha users to chat with each other. If any user is interested in giving a 10 minute presentation or demonstration of some aspect of Koha, please contact one of us.

Places for this event are limited so please book early by contacting Matthew Hale at the King’s Fund: m.hale@kingsfund.org.uk. If there is sufficient interest we will repeat it at a later date, so do register your interest even if you can’t necessarily make this day.

KohaCon 2010 Program Available
by Nicole C. Engard

As we get closer to the next annual KohaCon (this year in NZ – where it all started) it’s time to check out the program for the event! We are still gathering speaker bios and program description updates, but the preliminary program is available on the conference site.

Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.

Please send future story ideas to

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.02.00-beta.tar.gz

Checksums and signatures to verify the download can be retrieved from:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.02.00-beta.tar.gz.sig
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.02.00-beta.tar.gz.MD5.asc
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.02.00-beta.tar.gz.MD5

A list of the bugs patched since the release of the second alpha can be found in the email announcing the beta release.  I would like to thank all who have been working on closing bugs, and I would like to give a special tip of my hat to Lars Wirzenius for his work on the Debian packaging of Koha and to Katrin Fischer for enhancing the German localization of Koha and working on other translation glitches.

At this point, I am declaring a string freeze with the following exceptions:

• forward ports from 3.0.x (for which translated strings can
  presumably be grabbed from the 3.0.x translations)
• remaining 3.2 release blockers.

199 Commits
22 different Authors
A total of 5046 lines added, 2374 removed (delta 2672)

You can see more statistics at http://git.koha-community.org/stats/koha-master/

Table of Contents

• Libraries & Librarians
  • National University of Córdoba Goes Live with Koha
  • The first Koha Librarian – Honoured
• Tips & Tricks
  • Change the size of the opacsmallimage
  • Track In House Usage
• Koha Events
  • Koha symposium in France
  • KohaCon 10 Roadtrip – Signup Now!
• Development & Company News
  • Koha Debian Packages
  • Koha Hosting from Granthalaya and Anant Corporation
  • Koha in Book Industry Communication

Libraries & Librarians

National University of Córdoba Goes Live with Koha
by Tomás Cohen Arazi

We are pleased to announce that the National University of Córdoba (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina) has finished its migration to Koha 3. The process was leaded by a team of members of the institution and comprised the migration of 22 libraries and over 300k records from CDS/ISIS to MARC21. We are happy to implement this open source solution and want to thank the great Koha community and its fantastic developers for your support. Without it this wouldn’t be possible.

Read the full announcement.

The first Koha Librarian – Honoured
by Chris Cormack

Every year in New Zealand on the Queen’s Birthday weekend, New Zealanders who have provided service to the community are honoured. In this years honours list Rosalie Blake, who was the head librarian at Horowhenua Library Trust when Koha was written, was honoured with a QSM (Queen’s Service Medal).

Rosalie Helen Blake, Levin, for services to the library profession

I’m sure the whole Koha community will congratulate her on a well deserved award.

Tips & Tricks

Change the size of the opacsmallimage
by Koustubha Kale

Koha’s system preference “opacsmallimage” has always amused me because of its limitation of size. Most of the time it won’t fit your libraries logo.

Here I have a jquery based script that can be used in “opacuserjs” which overcomes this limitation. While replacing Koha logo the script also adds a “Powered by Koha” with Koha logo and a link back to the koha-community.org site at the bottom of the page.

See the script.

Track In House Usage
by Nicole C. Engard

Koha allows for the easy tracking of items that are used within the library. To do this you first need to create a patron of the ‘Statistical’ type. At the end of the day when you’re clearing off all of the tables in the library you simply check those books out to the statistical patron and an in house use will be logged. This will show your board and decision makers that the library is being used even if items are not leaving the library. To learn more about tracking in house use, view this page in the manual.

Koha Events

Koha symposium in France
by Pascale Nalon

About 120 people had met during two days in Miramas, South France, in a symposium organized by the MIOP in collaboration with KohaLa.

The program can be seen here and presentations and videos are coming soon!

KohaCon 10 Roadtrip – Signup Now!
by Joann Ransom

Now is the time folks to put your money where your mouth is and sign up for the road trip from Auckland to Wellington on the weekend before KohaCon.

Click here for details of the trip.

Signup information can be found here.

Development & Company News

Koha Debian Packages
by Lars Wirzenius

There is now an apt repository for Koha Debian packages. It has preliminary packages of the Koha development version (what will become 3.2), built for the Debian development version (what will become the next Debian stable release). This repository is for testing purposes only, and is not meant for production installations. It would, however, be good for the packages to get testing so that when Koha 3.2 is released, the packages are of high quality.

All feedback on the Debian packaging is welcome, either to the koha-devel mailing list, or to the bug tracking system.

• http://debian.koha-community.org/koha/

• http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Debian
• http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2010-May/034097.html

Koha Hosting from Granthalaya and Anant Corporation
by Koustubha Kale

Granthalaya.org and Anant Corporation are very pleased to announce general availability of Koha hosting on granthalaya.org server located in VPM, Thane datacenter.

Our first user of this service is already live, please see opac.kalibindia.com. Learn more.

Koha in Book Industry Communication
by MJ Ray

software.coop has joined Book Industry Communication as an associate member, mainly in order to voice experiences of the Koha community and the co-op about RFID tag standardisation and related sustainable development. We want to give the Free and Open Source Software library world and the co-op’s charity and academic clients more input in developing this big change to libraries.

Read more about it at: http://www.news.software.coop/categories/koha/

Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.

Please send future story ideas to

Rosalie Helen Blake, Levin, for services to the library profession

I’m sure the whole Koha community will congratulate her on a well deserved award.

Click here for details of the trip.

Signup

Please copy the headings below into an email and send it to: jransom@library.org.nz with  KohaCon Roadtrip in the subject line:

• Name/s of people,
• Arrival in Auckland details:  carrier and flight number, date and time,
• Accommodation preferences: share twin / double / single (surcharge will apply) and who you want to share with (if known,
• Which nights you want accommodation for in Auckland.

Deposit

$NZD 200 per person deposit is required to secure place on the road trip. Can be made my Paypal but please add $NZ 4.50 Paypal commission per $100 because someone has to pay it and I havn’t added any padding to the trip costs.