Koha Community Newsletter: January 2015
Koha Community Newsletter 
January 2015
Volume 6, Issue 1
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 3.18.3 Released
by Chris Cormack
The Koha release team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.18.3.
This is the latest release of the current stable branch of Koha, this is a security and bugfix release. We strongly recommend all 3.18.x users upgrade to this latest version.
Extra thanks in this release goes to Carlos Córdova, Larry Letelie, and BSZ-BW for reporting the security issues.
As always you can wait for a few hours for the packages to appear at debian.koha-community.org or if you are still running from tarballs you can download them at
Full release notes can be found here.
Koha 3.16.7 Released
by Mason James
The Koha release team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.16.7.
This is the latest release of the 3.16.x branch of Koha, this is a security and bugfix release. We strongly recommend all 3.16.x users upgrade to this latest version.
Extra thanks in this release goes to Carlos Córdova, Larry Letelie, and BSZ-BW for reporting the security issues.
As always you can wait for a few hours for the packages to appear at debian.koha-community.org or if you are still running from tarballs you can download them at
Full release notes can be found here.
Koha 3.14.12 Released
by Fridolin Somers
Koha 3.14.13 can be downloaded from: http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.14.13.tar.gz
Installation instructions can be found at http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Installation_Documentation or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball
Koha 3.14.13 is a security and bugfix/maintenance release.
We strongly recommend all 3.14.x users upgrade to this latest version.
Extra thanks goes to Carlos Córdova, Larry Letelie, and BSZ-BW for reporting the security issues.
It includes 2 security fixes and 6 bugfixes.
Full release notes can be found here.
Bugs and Features
This section highlights upcoming features as well as bugs needing attention.
Following patches submitted by Jonathan Druart at BibLibre.
Hea
A website to collect data from libraries using Koha.
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/KohaUsageStat_RFC
The feature is pushed and is in the 3.18 release.
And it will certainly be present in 3.16 soon.
Improved UTF-8 Handling
A big improvement for handling utf-8 in Koha has been pushed (bug 11944).
Encoding problems will be easier to fix.
Please let developers know if you see any encoding problems.
Tax rewrite ready to be tested
Original email announcement on koha-devel list here.
Testing needed!!!.
Librarians using the acquisition module are strongly encouraged to give
their opinion/feedback on this patch.
Community
New Koha Libraries
Stockholm University Library chooses Koha!!. Read the announcement and project report on the University’s blog.
Community Gossip
Chris Cormack reports on the success of the Catalyst Open Source Academy 2015.
How To
Parentheses in subject links got you down? Let Christopher Brannon show you how to
remove parenthesis from koha URLs with jQuery.
Nick Clemens explains how you can use MarcEdit to batch modify bib records Koha
Vimal Kumar recently posted a tutorial on how to add a staff patron in Koha.
Support Provider News
ByWater Solutions announces new koha crowd funding site. Read the announcement.
BibLibre is looking for two interns for this Summer. For more details check out their November 2014 Newsletter [ last paragraph of intro ].
BibLibre posts their contributions to Koha in 2014.
Koha News from Austria
by Stephan Witoszynskyj
Our Koha installation is now online! We are a small Ukrainian greek-catholic parish library located in Vienna, Austria. We started using Koha about a year ago and, finally, managed to get a public server and migrated our installation to this server.
At the same time we integrated our web-page into our Koha installation to provide our users a seamless user experience. The goal was to present our catalogue in a way that makes it also accessible to readers who are not used using electronic catalogues.
I wish to thank everyone in the Koha community who provided help, either by answering my questions on this lists or by creating all those amazing resources one can find on the web (video tutorials, blogs, the Koha wiki, …). All those things make Koha great and fun to work with.
Please, visit our site and let me know your comments and feedback.
Of course, we would be happy to be added to the list of Koha users on the Koha web-site:
Public Library of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Parish St. Barbara, Vienna, Austria
http://library.st-barbara-austria.org/
Koha News from Finland
by Olli-Antti Kivilahti
The Joensuu Regional Library migrated to Koha 3.14.XXX 2nd of July 2014 and has been using Koha about 6 months now.
We have around 28 branches, bookmobiles and other faculty libraries in our consortium, where Valtimo being our newest addition outside the initial Koha consortium.
Some figures to follow:
- Inhabitants ~120 000 of which 53 000 active borrowers.
- Circulation/year ~2 500 000 Checkouts/Renewals
- Collection ~1 000 000 Items
During years 2014-15 we are targeting to grow our consortium to the whole North Carelian Province.
The population we would serve is around:
- Inhabitants 166 000 with 69 000 active borrowers
- Circulation/year 3 300 000
- Collection 1 600 000 Items
We will have a unified Koha installation with unified circulation rules and will try to streamline and normalize operational rules throughout the forming cooperative, while providing a smooth service to all borrowers regardless of their city or municipality across the whole province.
Finnish libraries have some quite distinct needs compared to what was initially available from the Koha community edition, for example to be able to display component parts and edit/import/create them smoothly. Also one big modification was allowing one borrower to place multiple holds on the same biblio, so teachers and study groups could borrow books for their classes.
Also a ton of other minor modifications and integrations to 3rd party vendors. We are aiming to incorporate as much of our work to the master branch, where feasible.
Koha has stirred national interest in Finland, in the wake of whole Scandinavia adopting Koha in various libraries. We believe we won’t be the only public library in Finland using Koha for long.
We are constantly being approached by other public and academic libraries throughout the nation to come and see our Koha in action!
On November the 19th of 2014 we were awarded the Ministry of Culture and Education’s library innovators award as a show of support for our struggles to bring open source to Finnish libraries. (http://vimeo.com/111650768)
BTW, we are planning to host a Koha-party next spring and are inviting staff from Finnish libraries and abroad. We are hoping to attract both librarians and programmers to join our Northern meetup!
The event is held on 21-22nd of May and on saturday the 23rd we are hosting an excursion to visit the Koli National Park.
More information to follow.
Koha News from Bahrain
by Ketan Kulkarni
We are glad to report that koha has been implemented successfully at
The Bahrain Center for Strategic, International and Energy Studies
(DERASAT) with collaborative efforts of Engineers at DERASAT and First
Ray Consulting, Pune, an India based consulting firm. Here, LDAP and
RFID have also been implemented and they work with koha. Mapping of
library cardnumber and LDAP field was a blocker issue for some time.
However, a new field for card-number was created in the active
directory (LDAP) and mapped in koha to get around this. Online
dcoumentation provided by koha community was of immense help. We thank
koha-community for the same!
Upcoming Events
Hackfest 2015 in Marseille
BibLibre posted some updates about the upcoming Hackfest in Marseille.
Dates: March 2015 2nd to 6th
North American Koha Conference 2015 [ UPDATE ]
Dates announced:
August 4-7, 2015
The conference will be held by:
Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania
…more on this as details emerge!!
Past Events
January General IRC Meeting
The January general IRC meeting was held on the 14th at 10 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
January Development IRC Meeting
The January Development IRC meeting was held the 21st at 15 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
Editor, Koha Community Newsletter