Koha Community Newsletter: October 2014
Koha Community Newsletter 
October 2014
Volume 5, Issue 10
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
Feature freeze date for Koha 3.18 was announced. Halloween!
Read the announcement
Community
New Koha Libraries
- Huntsville-Madison County Public Library in Alabama (USA) via ByWater Solutions
- Albright College Library in Pennsylvania (USA) via ByWater Solutions
Community Gossip
Melissa Lefebvre gives a great explanation on why you need to clear your browser’s cache after a koha upgrade.
Barton Chittenden shows you how to report software errors.
The Koha North America User’s Group is looking for proposals for the next meeting.
Nicole Engard attended the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC and reports on the conference in the following posts:
- Easing into open source
- What Academia Can Learn from Open Source
- Open Source – The Key Component of Modern Applications
You can read more about this conference and the Internet Librarian conference at Nicole’s blog, What I Learned Today.
Bob Birchall proposes two new community roles. See his proposal here.
Marshall Breeding invites you to participate in the 2014 International Library Automation Perceptions Survey.
Galen Charlton discusses patron data and privacy issues in his blog post, Tips and tricks for leaking patron information.
How to
Rocio Jordan shows you how to prepare records for import in this post.
Christopher Brannon explains how you can use variables in your reports to eliminate the need to prompt for the same variable multiple times, Eg. dates.
John Andrews explains how CSS can be used to hide the checkin column in Koha circulation.
Need a quick way to show staff how to clear their browser’s cache? Send them this video by Aaron Sakovich.
Pierre Vandekerckhove demonstrates how you can Create and modify patrons lists in koha.
Upcoming Events
KohaCon 2015 news
Projektlink Konsult Ltd. has submitted a proposal for the location of Kohacon 2015.
You can read their proposal here.
October IRC Meeting
The October general IRC meeting will be held on the 22nd at 13:00 UTC.
The agenda and other information are here.
November IRC meeting
The November IRC meeting will be held on the 19th at both 05:00 and 21:00 UTC.
The agenda and other information are here.
November Hack Meetings in Italy
Hackmeetings are scheduled in November on the 13th and 14th. They will be in Segrate Italy, directions here.
- Timetable:
- 13/Nov 09.30 – 17.30
- 14/Nov 09.30 – 17.30
You can find the original announcement on the lists here.
Past Events
News from attendees of Kohacon 2014 in Cordoba
Read the following blog posts from Joy Nelson covering:
- Keynote speech by Tomas Cohen Arazi,
- a tour of the Biblioteca Mayor at the Manzana Jesuitica
- and a student project from the Library Science School at the University.
Pierre Vandekerckhove writes about Kohacon 2014 here.
A series of blog posts from Chris Cormack from Kohacon:
- Day 1
- Kohacon14 – Day 1 – Keynote and Opening
- Kohacon day 1 – Choir and History Presentation
- Kohacon14 Day 1 – Translating the Koha Manual
- Kohacon14 Day 14 – Community Organisation
- Kohacon14 Day 1 – Being a citizen : Hints for developing a feature
- Day 2
- Kohacon14 – Day 2 – DigiBePé
- Kohacon 14 Day 2 – MetaBiblioteca: implementando una red de Koha
- Kohacon14 Day 2 – Bokeh
- Kohacon 14 Day 2 – Extending Koha using linked data
- Day 3
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – Translations, why and how we should translate/adapt the SQL files
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – School Bibliotecology 1
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – School Bibliotecology 2
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – School Bibliotecology 3
- Kohacon 14 Day 3 – Funding the Koha project
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – EDS plugin integration with Koha
- Kohacon14 Day 3 – Coral
- Food and Pictures
- Cordoba – The food edition
- More photos from Córdoba
Koha Open Day – American University of Rome
by Stefano Bargioni
The American University of Rome (http://www.galileo.aur.it/) hosted the first Koha users meeting in Rome, Italy, organized by the Koha Gruppo Italiano (https://www.facebook.com/KohaGruppoItaliano – http://www.kohagruppoitaliano.moonfruit.com/) on October 30th.
A total of 49 participants met at the American University of Rome’s auditorium on the Gianicolo to meet and exchange experiences about their migration to Koha or their interest in Koha and have an opportunity to freely discuss the pros and cons, as well as ask questions. A panel of five speakers, consisting of Paul Arenson (ICCROM – http://biblio.iccrom.org/ ), Stefano Bargioni (Pontificia Università della Santa Croce – http://catalogo.pusc.it/ ), Sebastian Hierl (American Academy in Rome – http://library.aarome.org/), Giuseppina Manuli (Pontificia Università San Tommaso d’Aquino – http://pust.urbe.it/), and Father Mariano Sanz (Rettore del Centro Español de Estudios Eclesiásticos en Roma), discussed their reasons for selecting Koha as their institutions’ ILS to get the meeting started. Among the topics discussed were comparisons of the overall cost to that of traditional ILS vendors; the greater responsibility, but also flexibility in running an Open Source software; the quality and vitality of the Koha community and vendor support; existing bugs; the periodicals module; and perspectives for future development, in particular with ElasticSearch and the necessity to integrate Koha with the Italian national union catalog, the Indice SBN.
The event was extremely successful and the Koha Gruppo Italiano hopes to host more events like this in the future. Event photos are posted on https://www.flickr.com/photos/kohagruppoitaliano/sets/72157646724722884/. The next Koha event in Italy will be the Hackmeeting organized by Cineca in Segrate (Milan) on November 13/14.
Editor, Koha Community Newsletter