Koha Community Newsletter: May 2014

Posted on Posted in 3.14, 3.16, Events, IRC Meetings, Koha Newsletter, Koha Tips & Tricks, KohaCon 2014 Tagged with

Koha Community Newsletter Subscribe
May 2014

Volume 5, Issue 5
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg and Joanne Dillon, Koha Community Newsletter Editors.

Please submit news items to Submit

Table of Contents

Development

Koha 3.16.0 Released

by Galen Charlton

The Koha community is pleased to announce the release of version
3.16.0 of the Koha library automation system.

Koha 3.16 is an enhancement and bugfix release. Changes of particular
note include:

  • There is now the ability to use different templates for notices
    based on how the notice is to be sent. For example, is now possible to
    use different wording for email and SMS hold notifications.
  • Users can now unselect active facets when refining search results.
  • Search history can be now displayed and managed in the staff interface.
  • Loan checkins can now be backdated to an arbitrary date.
  • Holds can now be individually suspended and resumed from the OPAC.
  • Creating orders from staged files now offers much more flexibility.
  • The public reports service can now accept report parameters.
  • There is experimental support for Plack for development use.
  • The index update script can now operate as a daemon, allowing the
    indexes to be updated within seconds of a catalog record getting
    updated.

There are many more enhancements, detailed in the release notes.

There are also a number of improvements under the hood, particularly
for internationalization. It is now possible to mark strings in the
Perl source code for translation, and translation of strings in the
JavaScript source code can now include placeholders. Also, a newer
version of jQueryUI is now used by the staff interface.

Koha can be downloaded from Koha Downloads. Debian
packages of Koha 3.16.0 will be available shortly.

Additional details, including the release notes, can be found at here.

Koha 3.14.7 Released

by Fridolin Somers

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.14.7.

This is a maintenance release and contains some enhancements and several bugfixes.
As always you can download the release from Koha Downloads.

See the full release notes and changelog here.

Patches

This section highlights upcoming features as well as bugs needing attention.

The following patches were submitted for your attention by Jonathan Druart at BibLibre:

GST/VAT management in the Acquisition Module

BibLibre plans to rewrite the GST/VAT management in the acquisition module. They will submit a specification soon and communicate in order to get some feedback from the Koha community.

Batch modifications for records

BibLibre would really appreciate feedback/tests on the Batch modifications for records feature. For more information
see previous calls in the March newsletter and the message to the koha-dev list here:
http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2014-March/040377.html

Cleanup Koha UTF-8

I need some additional guys to test the “Cleanup Koha UTF-8” bug, see bug 11944. I need help from unicode experts to fix the search part.

The following patches were submitted for your attention by Melissa Lefebvre at ByWater Solutions:

Rollover outstanding orders not yet received

ByWater Solutions is working on some exciting new additions to Koha. With our friends at BibLibre we are developing the ability to roll over acquisitions orders not received and the amounts encumbered/spent from the current (old) fiscal year the next with just a click of a button. More information can be found on bug 12164 (http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=12164) including a test plan if you would like to give it a whirl.

Convert checkouts table to ajax datatable

We have also been hard at work to convert the checkout tables to an ajax datatable. What this means is that checkout will be much faster then it is currently. In other words, if a patron has many checked out items, circulation.pl can take minutes to load due to having to process the previous checkout list. By converting this table to a datatable that fetches its data via ajax, we can make circulation.pl more responsive and wah-la instant speed at checkout. If you want to test and see for yourself how speedy quick things are head over to bug 11703 (http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=11703). We would love to have more people test this and submit their feedback.

Add SMS via email as an alternative to SMS services via SMS::Send drivers

Wouldn’t it be cool if Koha could send SMS messages to patrons without the need to subscribe to an SMS gateway server? Well with patch 9021 (http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=9021) we will be able to; however, we need your help to test this feature and sign off on this development to get it into Koha!

Related Projects

Chuck McCallum submitted a demo of a JS bookmarklet that can make copy-cataloging in Koha easier from non-Z39.50 data sources.

A demo of Koha integration is here:
http://firuta.huh.harvard.edu:8080/fp-koha-demo/
and a more complete readme and checkout instructions are here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/filteredpush/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/FP-DataEntry/

This project initially targeted the museums community where the idea of “copy-cataloging” isn’t as familiar. This plugin tries to be generic so that it could be used anywhere there is an authoritative source of information, and a web form that needs to be filled in.

Jonathan Druart developed a tool for developers called bz-splitter and it is available at
http://splitter.koha-community.org/. For more information see his post to the list here:
http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2014-May/040492.html

BibLibre Git Repo Moved

The BibLibre git repositories url has been changed. The new url can be found on the public projects list:
http://git.biblibre.com/public/projects

Community

New Koha Libraries

Community Gossip

The BibLibre git repositories url has been changed. The new url can be found on the public projects list:
http://git.biblibre.com/public/projects

AFI and BibLibre announce Bokeh, the first 4G documentary portal

How to

In his Did you know blog series this month, Pierre Vandekerckhove covers the following topics:

Support Provider News

ByWater Solutions Welcomes Mario Guilin as Systems Support. Mario will join the ByWater team in assisting new partners in managing their Koha Open Source ILS systems.

Upcoming Events

KohaCon 2014

KohaCon 2014 will be held in Córdoba, Argentina, October 2014.

For the schedule and registration details see the
KohaCon page.

North American Koha Users Group

The North American Koha Users Group will be held in Wenatchee, WA, August 2014.

For the schedule and other info see the
North American Koha Users Group page.

Register here

Submit presentations here

Some of the topics suggested by registered attendees:

  • Testing bugs
  • Workflow with git
  • Upcoming features – demos
  • Future of Koha – elasticsearch, plack …other improvements.
  • Overview of Bootstrap in OPAC

June General IRC Meeting

The June general IRC meeting will be held on June 3rd at 22 UTC and June 4th at 15 UTC.

The agenda and other information are here

Past Events

5 Day Koha and Dspace Workshop at Indus University, Karachi Pakistan

Pakistan Library Club (PLC-HQ) organized a 3 Days Training Workshop on “OPEN SOURCE LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: KOHA + DSPACE” in collaboration with Indus University, Karachi on April 18, 19 n& 20, 2014 at Indus University , Karachi. Mr. Sher Afzal (Chief Librarian Bahria University; HEC Trainer)

5 Day Koha and Dspace Workshop, Lahore Pakistan

HEC conducted 05 days’ workshop on “Integrated Library System “KOHA & DSPACE” at regional center, Lahore. The workshop was held from March 24-28 2014. Chief Librarian Bahria University, Mr. Sher Afzal was the resource person for the workshop.

Around 30 library professionals from Public Sector Universities of Punjab participated in the subject workshop. The purpose of the workshop was to educate professionals about the integrated library system “KOHA & DSPACE”.

Regional Workshop on FOSS Applications for Libraries held in Sri Lanka

A Regional Workshop on FOSS Applications for Libraries – from 4th to 8th April 2014, was held at the Library, Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL). The five day workshop covered Koha and Greenstone Digital Library software organized by the Open University of Sri Lanka, Library and The Digital Library Network of South Asia (DLNetSA). The workshop was inaugurated by the Vice Chancellor and the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Sri Lanka on 4th April, 2014 at 9.00 a.m. at the seminar room, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences. Three resource persons from DLNetSA, Ms. Dilara Begum (Librarian, Head of Library) and Mr. Mamun-Or-Rashid (Asst. Librarian), East West University, Bangladesh and Mr. Harsha Balasooriya from OUSL conducted the workshop. The participants are from different sectors such as from Banks, Medical Profession, and Libraries & Information Centres throughout the Sri Lanka.

May General IRC Meeting

The May general IRC meeting was held on May 7th 2014.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

About

Editor, Koha Community Newsletter

1 Comment on “Koha Community Newsletter: May 2014”

  1. Thank you So much for covering the Koha training workshop which was organized by Higher Education Commission Government of Pakistan in Lahore and Pakistan Library Club at Karachi. This will also encourage to promote the open source software in Pakistani Libraries using Koha Library Integrated Software. We hope that koha community will make Koha as free bugs and more functional for the Developing Nations/countries Libraries.