Koha Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 9: September 2012
Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328) 
Volume 3, Issue 9: September 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 3.8.5 Released
by Chris Cormack
The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.5.
This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.
You can download the release here.
Packages will be available here soon.
Release notes are here.
Koha 3.6.9 Released
by Jared Camins-Esakov
The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.6.9.
This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.
You can download the release here.
Release notes are here.
Koha Statistics
Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted signoff statistics for August.
Release Manager’s Newsletter
Paul Poulain, Koha 3.8 & 3.10 Release Manager, publishes a monthly newsletter dedicated to Koha development. It can be found on the Koha Community website in the Koha News category.
The latest issue is here.
Search Re-write Underway
by Jared Camins-Esakov
The first few steps of the search rewrite have been funded (up to 1(b).iii. on the RFC), so I will shortly be starting work on integrating the new QueryParser. This initial part of the development will not be disruptive, but will fix a number of corner cases, such as “magic” punctuation breaking searches, and giving librarians the option of writing sophisticated boolean searches that actually work the way they are supposed to.
I will of course be keeping all my code in a public repository so that anyone who is interested can take a look as the work progresses. I would request that anyone with examples of problematic searches (or searches they would like to be able to do) tell me about them, so we can use those searches as tests in the course of development.
Koha Community
New Koha Libraries
- Grand County Public Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
- North Central Michigan College (USA) (Equinox Software)
- Sherwood School (New Zealand) (via Anact Open Source Solutions)
- Trillium Lakelands District School Board (Canada) (via ByWater Solutions)
- Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21 (Argentina) (via Tomás Cohen Arazi)
- Urban School of San Francisco’s Herbst Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
Community Gossip
Ruth Bavousett has posted her thoughts on open source and the prevention of vendor lock-in.
Gaetan Boisson reports that Rennes 2 University did an amazing job on their opac.
Kyle Hall has posted a method of using jQuery to add to the bottom of a checkout slip the total value of the items a patron is checking out.
Nicole Engard has posted over 100 Koha tutorial videos over the last few years. She just added tags to all of them to make them easier to find.
Jared Camins-Esakov reports there’s a fun new source of enhanced content for the OPAC. iDreamBooks has a “Readometer” which gives a numeric rating based on reviews from critics, and it can now be embedded in the OPAC using this jQuery code. There are a limited number of books right now, but Jared has spoken to the folks at iDreamBooks and says they plan to gradually fill in their archives.
Past Koha Events
September General IRC Meeting
The September general IRC meeting was held on 5 September 2012.
More information, including the agenda and links to the minutes, is here.
Global Bug Squashing Day
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 day was held on Friday, 14 September 2012, and there was much rejoicing.
More info is here.
First German Koha Workshop
by Katrin Fischer
From 28 to 29 August 2012 the first German Koha workshop was held at the Württemberg State Library (WLB) in Stuttgart. About 23 people attended, ranging from librarians to developers, and composed mostly of people interested in learning more about Koha, along with some currently migrating to it. Wolfgang Heymans and Katrin Fischer from BSZ and Robin Sheat from Catalyst IT presented talks covering workflows to customisations, installation to reporting.
The slides of the presentations are available online. The feedback from the participants was positive and we hope that people got a good impression of the potential of Koha and its community.
Upcoming Koha Events
October General IRC Meeting
The October general IRC meeting will be held on 10 October 2012 at 10:00 UTC.
More information, including the agenda, is available here.