Koha Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 4: April 2012
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 Community
- Past Koha Events
- Upcoming Koha Events
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.