Koha Newsletter: Volume 1/Issue 3: March 2010

Posted on Posted in Koha Newsletter

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 1, Issue 3: March 2010

Table of Contents

 

KohaCon 2010

KohaCon10 Registrations Open
by Russel Garlick

The 3rd Koha Conference will be held in Wellington, New Zealand October 24-29, 2010. The conference consists of a 3 day conference proper followed by a 3 day hackfest. The conference is open to all members of the Koha Community and registration is essential. It is free to attend the conference, but due to room size and other constraints, the organisers need to know exactly who will be turning up. If you are looking to get to NZ from the far flung reaches of the world, then please check out the conference website http://www.kohacon10.org.nz. Members of the community have contributed advice on traveling from the US, Europe and elsewhere. We have also arranged some accommodation deals with local hotels.

Call for Papers Open
by Russel Garlick

If you have already registered, have you considered giving a talk? The call for conference papers is also open. We’d love to see presentations from librarians for librarians, sharing their experiences, tricks and tips. Talk times are flexible, with long and short options, so please consider registering as a speaker.

Sponsorship
by Russel Garlick

KohaCon10 is being organised and run by volunteers and is entirely reliant on sponsorship. The organisors would like to thank the sponsors that have already come on board (Libriotech, ByWater Solutions, BibLibre and Catalyst IT). If your company is interested in sponsoring the
event, please contact Russel Garlick (russ on irc, or russel.garlick@gmail.com). As a free conference, reliant completely on sponsorship, we regret that we are unable to provide financial assistance for anyone wishing to attend the conference.

 

Koha News

New Koha Community Site
by Owen Leonard

The Koha community has attempted to communicate with LibLime about the situation without success. The Koha community has nominated the Horowhenua Library Trust to act as an independent steward of Koha-related assets like the Koha.org and the Koha trademark. We have proposed to LibLime that, given their lack of care and interest in Koha.org, transfer the domain and its management to HLT and let the Koha community take back control. LibLime has not responded to these requests.

The community was left with no choice: we had to create a new home for the Koha project. We can no longer depend on the good will of LibLime. Koha-community.org came together quickly and beautifully thanks to all involved. Thanks are owed especially to Liz at the Northeast Kansas Library System for all her hard work.

If you want to share a link to the real open source Koha, please use http://koha-community.org.

Read the entire post at http://www.myacpl.org/koha/?p=522.

Popular Libraries in Argentina Choose Koha
by Verónica Lencinas

In 2007 five popular libraries from Córdoba (a province in Argentina) united to form a union catalog. Popular libraries are non governmental organizations in Argentina that receive funds from the national government through the Comisión Nacional Protectora de Bibliotecas Populares (http://www.conabip.gov.ar). In most villages, towns and cities they are the only public libraries available. Since there were no special funding for the union catalog, all work had to be done for free and free software were the only option considered. In September 2007 the first version of the catalog went online at http://catalogo.puntobiblio.com running on Koha 2.2.9. Now the network has broadened to 18 libraries and include now not only popular libraries but also public, school, academic and special libraries. The first popular library to implement Koha 3.0 in Argentina was the Biblioteca Popular República Argentina, who was also the founder of the network. Now other popular libraries as well as the Comisión Nacional Protectora de Bibliotecas Populares had shown their interest in a broader implementation of Koha.

Growing Trend: Koha integrated with Kete
by Walter McGinnis

A number of organizations using Koha are tying in search results from an affiliated Kete site. These same Koha OPACs are then accessed from their Kete sites for their search results, too. This makes it easier for users to discovery complimentary resources no matter which system the items are stored in. This is accomplished via both software packages’ support of the OpenSearch standard.

On the Koha side, Chris Cormack from Catalyst IT has written a simple add-on to the Koha OPAC to take a user’s keyword search terms and request results from a designated Kete site and place the results in a sidebar beside the normal catalog results. Kieran Pilkington from Katipo Communications has also contributed to this code.

The code works fine, but is not apart of the Koha codebase yet as it could have a better user interface for setting the designated OpenSearch source by non-technical Koha administrators.

On the Kete site, site administrators simply fill out a form to identify the Koha catalogue’s search interface as an external search source. A similar sidebar then will appear next to the Kete site’s search results. In Kete, there is also the ability to automatically look up an item’s title in external search sources and display their results while on the item’s Kete detail page.

Since both the Koha add-on and the Kete External Search Sources functionality are built around the OpenSearch standard, other services that follow this standard can also be tied in as search target. The sites using this functionality are in New Zealand, Australia, and the Middle East.

 

Koha Tips

Meta-searching with Koha and Paspar2
by Mark Osborne

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

Sound familiar? It’s the opening line of Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It’s a great novel but we don’t have a copy of it in our library. But then with freely available e-books and public domain audio books it’s probably not the end of the world. What we do need to have is the ability for our students to search for and find these resources; which is why we’re setting up Paspar2 integration with Koha. It allows us to set up meta-searching beyond our catalogue, querying Project Gutenberg, Librivox.org, Google Books and a host of other online resources. That means if we don’t have a physical holding of an item, our students can still access a copy for an e-book reader, laptop or iPod.

 

 

Newsletter edited by Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager.

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