Koha Community Newsletter: April 2013

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April 2013

Volume 4, Issue 4
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
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Table of Contents

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.5 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.10.5. This is a stable release and contains many bugfixes.

Koha 3.10.5 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.12 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of 3.8.12. This is a maintenance release and contains many bugfixes.

Koha 3.8.12 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for March 2013.

Release Team for Koha 3.14 Elected
by Liz Rea

The Koha Community is pleased to announce the release team for Koha version 3.14 (code name Pi). The team includes volunteers from nine countries and represents Koha support companies and libraries from around the world.

  • Release Manager: Galen Charlton, USA, Equinox
  • Translation Manager: D Ruth Bavousett, USA
  • Documentation Manager, Database Doc Manager: Nicole Engard, USA, ByWater Solutions
  • Installation Documentation Managers: Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha; Samuel Desseaux, France
  • Quality Assurance Manager: Katrin Fischer, Germany, BSZ
  • Quality Assurance Team: Marcel de Rooy, Netherlands, Rijksmuseum; Chris Cormack, New Zealand, Catalyst IT; Jonathan Druart, France, BibLibre; Brendan Gallagher, USA, ByWater Solutions; Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha; Paul Poulain, France, BibLibre; Kyle M Hall, USA, ByWater Solutions
  • Release Maintainers: 3.12.x: Tomás Cohen Arazi, Argentina, UNC; 3.10.x: Bernardo Gonzalez Kriegel, Argentina; 3.8.x: Chris Hall, New Zealand, Catalyst IT
  • Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat, New Zealand, Catalyst IT
  • Live CD/DVD Manager: Nguyen Quoc Uy, Vietnam
  • VM Manager: Samuel Desseaux, France
  • Bug Wrangler: Magnus Enger, Norway, Libriotech
  • Newsletter Editor: Daniel Grobani, USA, Samuel Merritt University

Thanks to our volunteers, and here’s to a successful 3.14 Release!

P.S. No, it’s not really code name Pi. But it could be!

Olly Olly Oxen Free: Integrators with Koha, Stand Up and be Counted
by Galen Charlton

Does your project, service, or product interact with Koha in some automated fashion? If so, we’d like to hear from you.

I’m using the phrase “automated fashion” very broadly. There are many ways to receive data from a Koha system, update data in a Koha database, or make transactions happen. A few of these ways include:

  • RESTful web service calls
  • SIP2 to perform patron and circulation requests
  • Z39.50, unAPI, and OpenSearch to retrieve catalog data
  • LDAP to authenticate patrons
  • MARC exports and imports
  • Screen-scraping (although if you’re screen-scraping Koha, we may be able to suggest a better way to do it)
  • Direct database access
  • And others

Some of the things we’d like to know include:

  • The name of your service or product
  • What it does for a Koha library
  • How it is accessing Koha
  • Whether there are specific APIs or entry points that your application depends on
  • If there are things that Koha could be doing to make your life easier

We want to hear from everybody, whether you are a library that has integrated Koha with other software, a Koha support group, a vendor providing products or services to libraries, or a member of a free software project whose software talks with Koha. If you work for a Koha library and know that Koha works with another service, we want to hear from you too, even if you don’t know how Koha is doing the talking.

Why do we want to know? Our reasons include:

  • Finding out which entry points we should be particularly careful about changing as Koha gets enhanced.
  • Seeing if there are things we could be doing better to encourage more people and applications to participate in the Koha ecosystem.
  • (Maybe) putting together a list of third-party services that interact with Koha.

To respond, please comment on this post.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

Community Gossip

Nguyen Quoc Uy is working to promote Koha in Vietnam. He’s joined the 3.14 release team and created a website to share Koha resources in Vietnamese.

Jessica Tobin of the Arnold Library in Seattle will be participating in a panel presentation on libraries’ experiences with open source ILS’s at the 2013 Washington Library Association/Oregon Library Association (WLA/OLA) conference in Vancouver, WA, on April 26.

Chris Cormack has used jqPlot to add a new graph to the Koha Dashboard showing the totals of the last 7 days’ bug activity.

Kenza, a student, has been hired for the summer by BibLibre and will be devoting all her time to Koha community work.

Jesse Weaver, A.K.A. pianohacker, has been hired for the summer by ByWater Solutions and will be devoting all his time to Koha community work. Jesse may also be joining the Quality Assurance Team for the summer.

Owen Leonard submitted a patch for Koha bug 10,000.

Mark Johnson of OSS Watch has posted an account of the LibLime/PTFS/Community rift and lessons for those involved with open source projects.

La traduction de la newsletter Koha Communautaire de mars 2013 viennent d’être publiées sur Koha-fr.

Christine Park is seeking panelists for the California Academic and Research Library Association’s October webinar, “So you’re thinking of upgrading your ILS”. If your library has recently switched its ILS and you’d like to share your experience with others, see Christine’s call for panelists.

Karam Qubsi reports that Koha master and 3.12 now support RTL (for right-to-left languages) “like never before.”

Support Provider News

David Noe has joined ByWater Solutions as Koha Migrations Specialist.

BibLibre has launched a Koha demonstration site, with access to both a staff interface and an OPAC. More info is here.

ByWater Solutions has posted a page on Koha’s new plugin system.

Upcoming Koha Events

May General IRC Meeting

The May general IRC meeting will be held on 7 May 2013 at 02:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Limoges Koha Event

Symposium Koha 2013 will be held in Limoges 24-26 June 2013. More info is here.

KohaCon13 Big Update
by Nancy Keener, KohaCon13 Chair

KohaCon13, the international users’ conference of the Koha open-source library system, will be held October 16–22 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, USA.

We are going to have a great conference. Registration is free! Please consider joining us to learn about Koha, the community, and what libraries are doing with Koha around the world. Talks will range from introductory to advanced and will be geared toward Koha users, developers, and fans.

We had our fourth IRC planning meeting on 23 April.

We currently have 38 people registered. We need to have all hotel reservations made by September 15th to get the free meeting rooms and AV equipment.

19 programs have been proposed so far:

  • training
  • 14 years of the Koha project
  • hardware requirements for standard and virtual servers
  • accessing all library materials at one time with VuFind
  • round table discussions on all modules
  • using telephone notification in Koha
  • Koha live USB for LIS teaching purposes
  • Libki demo
  • plug-ins
  • accessing all library materials at one time with DSpace
  • testing and signing off on bugs
  • history of Koha
  • community organization
  • Koha use cases
  • new web services and Drupal integration
  • a Nevada cultural moment
  • serials management on a shoestring
  • open source ERMSs
  • GoKB

We would like a few more people to volunteer to offer a program. And if you don’t see a program you think we need, please email me.

Galen Charlton, our next Release Manager, will be our opening speaker. Megan Conelly, a Washoe County Librarian, will be our Mistress of Ceremonies.

Thursday night will be the Nevada Library Association (NLA) President’s reception at the Downtown Reno library branch, which is directly north of the Atlantis via a short bus ride. This special event will feature beer, wine, and food and will most likely cost US$20.

27 people have expressed interest in a Saturday road trip, so that is going forward. We are investigating Tahoe, Squaw Valley, Virginia City, University of Nevada, and Reno Makerspace.

We are preparing to send out sponsorship invitations to vendors, inviting them to sponsor food for our break times, buses for our Saturday trips, or just to give money. Sponsors will be acknowledged before and during the conference. We will be asking local restaurants for discounts. More information will be on the KohaCon13 website soon.

Vendors requesting booth space at KohaCon13 are being directed to our NLA friends who will be just next door. There will be a table for brochures, and of course our attendees will be welcome to visit NLA vendors.

A lot of libraries have migrated to Koha in the last year. KohaCon13 is the best place to see what is going on and to meet all of the people who help keep Koha the best ILS out there. It just happens to be open source!

Learn more about KohaCon13 on the official conference site.

Past Koha Events

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting was held on 3 April 2013.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Marseille Hackfest

A Koha hackfest was held at BibLibre’s office in Marseille in March. Brendan Gallagher wrote about his experience of the event.