Koha Community Newsletter: January 2017
Koha Community Newsletter 
January 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg, Koha Community Newsletter Editor
Please submit news items to 
Table of Contents
- Development
- Community
- Upcoming Events
- Past Events
Development
Koha 16.11.02 Released
by Katrin Fischer
The Koha Community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.11.02.
Packages are available.
This is a maintenance release of 16.11 and contains 35 bugfixes.
Koha 16.05.08 Released
by Mason James
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.05.08.
Koha 16.5.8 is a bugfix/maintenance release.
It includes 25 bugfixes.
Koha 3.22.15 Released
by Julian Maurice
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.22.15
It is a maintenance release and includes 6 bugfixes.
Improved Koha installation process developed by Catalyst IT interns
by Alex Buckley
Catalyst IT summer interns Alex Buckley and Mika Smith have been working on improving the installation process of Koha for new users.
They have updated the current web installer (adding two setup modes: basic and advanced which provide users with varying levels of control), and an onboarding tool feature which takes the user through installing data they missed in the web installer and sets up a user account for them to log into Koha with for the first time.
The benefits of this project are:
1. The user will no longer be faced with a warning message the first time they log into Koha informing them they logged in with the database administrators account, as the onboarding tool allows them to create their own unique user account.
2. Users will have at least one library, patron category, patron, item type and circulation rule in their Koha database and so they can start using koha immediately.
To learn more go to:
https://catalyst.net.nz/blog/better-onboarding-tool-koha
What’s on in koha-devel #9
by Jonathan Druart
[ Originally published on the Koha and Development mailing lists: read original ]
Hello librarians and developers,
I wish you a happy new year, 2017 will be awesome, I am sure 🙂
At least it will be a great year for your favourite ILS – Koha is constantly improving and next releases will be even better than the last ones, as always 🙂
= Hea =
Some of us are still a bit hesitant about Hea because of the lack of communication around this project. It also seems that we would like to improve this tool and the way it displays data, to make it more attractive. To answer the first need, Chris wrote a privacy policy file [2]. You can send us feedback about it if things are not clear enough.
To improve data collected by Hea, I have opened 3 bug reports (actually 1 was already opened):
- Bug 14608 will add an administration page for Hea, to make it more visible and understandable
- Bug 17802 will collect ideas (and patches?) about adding geolocation of Koha’s installations
- Bug 17803 introduce the idea of collecting the number of libraries per installation. It will permit to know how many libraries are actually using Koha (vs the number of installations).
If you are interested in these topics, get involved on the mailing list or the corresponding bug reports.
= Benchmarks for 16.11 =
I have compared Koha versions from 3.14.x to 16.11. The results have been posted on the wiki [3]. Everybody can replay these benchmarks easily, and some of you must do it to confirm (or not) these numbers.
One important thing is that I noticed that the template caching system is not defined by default – however it brings a significant performance boost. I have opened a bug report (Bug 7533 – Add template_cache_dir to the koha-conf.xml file) to add the entry to the koha-conf file. This patch will also add a warning to the about page if the entry is not defined. If you are running a Koha install hosted by a (good) service provider, it should be correctly defined. But if you are self-hosted, you must definitely take a look at this configuration option.
To play these benchmarks I needed to rebuild a database for each of these different versions of Koha. This job leads me to modify the scripts from the koha-misc4dev [4] repository. With these scripts I am now able to get a Koha installation fully testable (items, reindexation, psgi file, etc.) with any of these versions in a few minutes. That should be very useful for developers, especially to benchmark, bisect, archaeological digs or simply debug.
= Important bugs waiting for love =
Last month I have sent an email to koha-devel to list several important bugs waiting to be tested or QAed. It was very helpful as (almost) all of them got the expected love and have been boosted quickly. Note that we always have these kinds of important bugs, and I will try to think about a way to keep a list of them. A simple and naive approach would be to list the major, critical and blocker ones on the dashboard. Any thoughts? The one we want to see in quickly for now is Bug 17817 – Repeat this Tag (cloning) not working. It is waiting for QA.
Furthermore if you are confident with SIP you should take a look at the different SIP patches in the needs signoff (17758 Major, 17665, 17826, 16755, 15418, 13666) and signed off queues (16757, 16895 and 16899).
= Refactoring =
== Remove the biblioitems.marcxml field ==
This is the last call!
Bug 17196 has now 4 independent signoffs, we need (at least) 1 QA guy to have a look at it. If it is not pushed quickly, I will block its integration into the next release. We do not want it to be pushed close to the release date.
== Koha::Patrons ==
I have started to replace the C4::Member::GetMember subroutine with Koha::Patrons.
You can take a look at bug 17829 to see the progress (check the remote branch on github). It’s a massive change as it impacts a lot of file and it depends on lot of other patches not pushed yet to master.
Using Koha::Patron will allow us to improve the REST API routes for the patron module. Moreover it will permit to manipulate patron objects and so to call the new methods recently added to our Koha::Patron module. That will make the code more readable than at the moment: only 1 patron structure will be manipulated and not 1 Koha::Patron object + the hashref returned by GetMember. Doing so the patron object will be sent to the templates and that will clean up a lot of scripts from the “members” module.
= Standardize our EXPORT =
Last month I talked about bug 17600. It did not get lot of attention. If nobody gets involved in the discussion I will put it aside.
= Template Toolkit syntax for notices =
Since Kyle’s topic on the koha mailing list [1] did not receive any objections I will try and coordinate with him to move forward on this subject.
The next general IRC meeting is on February 1st, 14 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_1_February_2017
The next dev IRC meeting is on January 11th, 20 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_11_January_2017
In 2 days!
Hope to see you there!
Cheers,
Jonathan
[1] Template Toolkit syntax for notices – https://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2016-December/046773.html
[2] Hea Privacy policy – http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=hea.git;a=blob;f=Privacy_Policy.md;hb=HEAD
[3] Benchmark for 16.11 – https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Benchmark_for_16.11
[4] koha-misc4dev – http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2016-November/043277.html
More Bugs Needing Attention
[ From mailing lists: read original
From Owen Leonard
Bug 16239 – Upgrade Bootstrap in the staff client
https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16239
Needs signoff!
Community
Presentation: Adding Relationship Designators in Koha
by Stefano Bargioni
At the Library of Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, a new way to navigate entities (author, corporate and meeting names) and show relationships among them, is up and running. It is based on 1xx and 7xx (MARC21) data, especially on authid ($9) and relator terms ($e, or $j in case of 711).
We are not yet in production with RDA, but we started applying relator terms and codes some months ago [1] [2] [3].
Relationships are stored and updated in a new Koha table whenever bib records are modified. In any OPAC page where an entity is shown, a new link appears, to show a “cloud” of names related to the selected entity [4]. Relationships are shown both as a 3D sphere in movement, and a set of lists to group and count names and roles [5].
We think that this is an interesting way to discover “who influenced” and “who was influenced by”, very important for a research library, its users and reference desk as well.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/stefanobargioni/catalog-enrichment-for-rda-adding-relationship-designators-in-koha (slides)
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/stefanobargioni/catalog-enrichment-for-rda-adding-relationship-designators-in-koha-text (text)
[3] https://koha-community.org/koha-community-newsletter-september-2016/#gossip
[4] See attached image, grabbed from http://catalogo.pusc.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=166156.
[5] http://catalogo.pusc.it/pusc_name_cloud.html?authid=110032
Community Gossip
See the results of the Perceptions 2016: An International Survey of Library Automation from
Marshall Breeding
Vinod Kumar Mishra has released a new book on library automation and Koha. Amazon Link: Basics of Library Automation, Koha Library Management Software and Data Migration: Challenges With Case Studies.
Chris Cormack created an infographic showing a brief summary of 2016 for the Koha project
How To
Let Joy Nelson show you how you can use non public item notes in Koha
Support Provider News
Baptiste Wojtkowski will be joining BibLibre as an intern. He will working on Koha full time for 6 months.
Bywater Solutions offers free SSL certificates to all hosted customers
Bywater Solutions receives platinum in 2017 Modern Library Awards
Upcoming Events
2017 Koha North California Summit
2017 Northern CA Koha Summit Event Date: April 5, 2017
- Event Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
- Event Location: Martha Riley Community Library
- Event Address: 1501 Pleasant Grove Boulevard, Roseville CA 95747
- Registration: Fill out form
Hackfest in Marseille 2017
[ announced on koha dev mailing list ]
by Paul Poulain
In 2017, the hackfest in Marseille is back to March. 20th-24th to be precise.
Feel free to join us ! (registration not yet open)
2nd National Koha Conclave – India
by Amit Gupta
The countdown for 2nd National Koha Conclave has started.
Informatics is pleased to announce the dates for National Koha Conclave-2017, a two day event on Koha and Indian Libraries. The event this year is organized in collaboration with Tata Consultancy Services, Pune on 21st and 22nd February 2017, in the Hinjewadi campus of TCS at Pune. This year again, we will have Mr. Chris Cormack (New Zealand), the original developer of Koha, as our Key Resource Person. Chris will also be presenting an advance level half-a-day workshop on Koha during this two day event. The event will witness several eminent speakers from the Indian Library landscape and Koha experts through plenaries, panel discussions, case studies and future development needs and opportunities on Koha. The event will be attended by existing and prospective users of Koha.
The highlights of the event are:
- Keynote on Library Services Platform
- Koha, the Road Ahead: A global view from Chris Cormack
- Development/Customization challenges
- Wish List by Participating Koha Users – Review Discussion
- Successful Koha implementations – Case Studies
- Advance Workshop on Koha (150 minutes)
- Panel Debate – Integration of Discovery Layer – ILS and ERMS
- Award for best implementation of Koha
- Launch of new products based on Koha
Please mark your calendar and block your dates for this event – 2nd National Koha Conclave 2017 – and register yourself for the event.
Kohacon 2017 Update: Final Dates
Final date for KohaCon17 will be on June 19-23, 2017 at Ayala Museum, Makati City.
To register:
KohaCon 2017 online registration form: https://goo.gl/forms/BSZz8NT46u4pBqT23.
UPDATE ON REGISTRATION: Registration is FREE!.
February 1 general IRC Meeting
The February General IRC meeting will be held on the 1st at 14:00 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
Past Events
Koha Day held in France on January 12th
by Sonia Bouis
KohaLa, a french Koha association, organised Koha day to present new features of last Koha release, 16.11 and to make a demo for non Koha users. We also added two sessions in the morning :
- Koha Plugins : presentation and focus on a few (many thanks to Kyle who gave us special explanations during the last hackfest).
- Open source ERM : we asked AMSL staff to explain their project. By now, they will put on standby their project because the German Research Association is supporting a national german level tool (LAS:er) which will add more consortium features. Their experience on ASML shows us the importance of Knowledge database, flexible data model, interoperability and easy interface. They also learn us how community and collaboration is a centrepiece of such project. Then, we had two presentations around CORAL : the evaluation that University Lyon 3 is beginning to do on this ERM and a complete demo.
Around 70 people attended this day, thanks to Frédéric Demians (TAMIL), Paul Poulain (Biblibre) and all the KohaLa staff who have participated in presentations and organisations.
You can find few photos here : https://goo.gl/photos/EiA22Qxe1gpunNuq5
January General IRC Meeting
The January general IRC meeting was held on the 4th at 20:00 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
January 11 Development IRC Meeting
The January development IRC meeting was held on the 11th at 20:00 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
January 25 Development IRC Meeting
The January development IRC meeting was held on the 25th at 13:00 UTC.
The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.
Editor, Koha Community Newsletter