Koha Community Newsletter: November 2014
Koha Community Newsletter 
November 2014
Volume 5, Issue 11
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg and Joanne Dillon, Koha Community Newsletter Editors.
Please submit news items to 
Table of Contents
- Development
- Community
- Upcoming Events
- Past Events
Development
Koha 3.18.0 Released
by Tomas Cohen Arazi
It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Koha 3.18.0, the latest major release of the Koha open source integrated library system.
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 Koha 3.18.0 tarball and install instructions can be found on the download page.
More install instructions and useful information can be found on the wiki and in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball
Koha 3.18.0 is a major release, that comes with many new features.
It includes 14 new features, 120 enhancements and 487 bugfixes.
Koha can be downloaded from Koha Downloads.
Full release notes can be found here.
Patches
This section highlights upcoming features as well as bugs needing attention.
Owen Leonard requests your input on the following bug:
Add better feedback for returns to the checkouts table
Bug 13290 (Add better feedback for returns to the checkouts table)
modifies the way check-ins are handled when one uses the checkboxes on
the circulation page’s table of checkouts.I would like to get opinions on how to best design the interaction,
especially from anyone out there who has the AJAX circ feature running
in production.
From: message on general list
Community
Community Gossip
Tomas Cohen Arazi shared this YouTube video on the mailing list. It covers KohaCon 2014. Original announcement can be found here.
Aaron Sakovich posted a video demonstrating the speed improvements in Koha 3.16’s checkout module.
Larry Baerveldt writes about MySQL database maintenance in his article Losing Weight in Koha
How to
- Kyle Hall shows you how to manipulate the Koha patron checkouts table.
- Vimal Kumar explains how you can customize Koha’s MARC Bibliographic Framework for easy data entry.
In his Did you know blog series this month, Pierre Vandekerckhove covers the following topic:
Upcoming Events
December General IRC Meeting
The December general IRC meeting will be held on the 17th of December at 09:00 and 21:00 UTC.
The agenda and other information are here
Past Events
Italian Koha Hackmeeting (12-13 Nov 2104)
by Zeno Tajoli
On the 12th and 13th of November, a hack meeting organized by Cineca was held in Segrate (MI). A total of 13 participants worked together in the laboratories to improve Koha and to work on Italian translations for the user manual and the staff client. The participants were from a lot of different organizations: there were both librarians and developers so it was a very good occasion for everyone to share experiences according to their different backgrounds. Zeno Tajoli, Silvia Simonetti and Alessandra Carassiti (all from Cineca) coordinated the activities. The results were very interesting for the Italian Koha community.
About the software: Emmanuele Somma and Zeno Tajoli made important tests for importing marc utf-8 compliant and research utf-8 compliant records. Luigi Messina, Claudio Kutufa and Salvatore Sanfilippo realized a converter to XSLT from MARC21 on z39.50 of the Library of Congress in UNIMARC, to use the new Z3950 Search Enhancements: SRU targets and additional XSLT processing. The patch is going to be issued.
At the same time the librarians Claudia Di Somma, Eliana Comite, Andrea Furin, Stefano Bargioni and Franziska Wallner worked on the Italian translation of the user manual of Koha 3.16 (in particular the chapters on the circulation, the serial and the system preferences) and the interface of the library staff of Koha 3.18.
The hackmeeting was also an important opportunity to consolidate the work of the Italian community of Koha. We hope there will be more events like this to expand the community in Italy.
November General IRC Meeting
The December general IRC meeting was held on the 19th.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
Editor, Koha Community Newsletter