The Koha Community Congratulates Winners of India’s Best Koha Implementation Award

3/8/2017
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla, KC Media Coordinator
ncurulla@gmail.com

The Koha Community Congratulates Winners of India’s Best Koha Implementation Award

The 2nd National Koha Conclave concluded in late February in Pune with the announcement of India’s Best Koha Implementation Award for 2017. There were 11 libraries in India who sent their nominations which were reviewed by a committee of 4 people including Mr. Chris Cormack who was the Chief Resource Person at the Conclave.

After a very diligent review by the committee, the Best Koha Implementation Award  was announced  jointly to the Vikram Sarabhai Library of the Indian Institute of Management and to the Mysore University Library. The award trophy  was presented by Mr. Chris Cormack and Mr. N V Sathyanarayana to the representatives of the IIM Ahmedabad library at the conclave on the last day of the event. Since no representative from  Mysore University Library was present, the trophy will be presented to the University Library during a separate function. 

Nominations were evaluated based on the following criteria:

  1. Quality of Records: MARC21 Format
  2. Full implementation of House Keeping Activities
  3. Facilitating access to e-books or e-resources through Z39.50 integration
  4. Multiple Libraries included in same administration on single platform (Multi-Tenant)
  5. Cloud or local hosting, reasons for deploying the same.
  6. Integration of messaging system with circulation activities
  7. User Interface – further developed in house or standard
  8. Local Customization – How many patches have been developed
  9. Bio-metric integration
  10. Is Koha integrated with RFID or not?
  11. Integrated  LDAP or third party single sign on

Informatics Publishing Ltd. and the Koha community congratulates both the IIM Ahmedabad Library and Mysore University Library for implementing Koha in the most innovative ways leading to its best utilization for the Library and its users.

About Koha:

Koha is the first web based and first free software library automation package. In use worldwide since 1999, its development is steered by a growing community of users collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. Since its creation, Koha has become the most downloaded ILS in the world with tens of thousands of libraries utilizing it globally.

Full-featured ILS: In use worldwide in libraries of all sizes, Koha is a true enterprise-class ILS with comprehensive functionality including basic and advanced options. Koha includes modules for acquisitions, circulation, cataloging, serials management, authorities, flexible reporting, label printing, multi-format notices, offline circulation for when Internet access is not available, and much more. Koha will work for consortia of all sizes, multi-branch, and single-branch libraries.

Multilingual and translatable: Koha has a large number of available languages, with more languages every year.

Full text searching: Powerful searching and an enhanced catalogue display that can use content from Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, Open Library, and Syndetics, among others.

Library Standards Compliant: Koha is built using library standards and protocols such as MARC 21, UNIMARC, z39.50, SRU/SW, SIP2, SIP/NCIP, ensuring interoperability between Koha and other systems and technologies, while supporting existing workflows and tools.

Web-based Interfaces: Koha’s OPAC, circ, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies–XHTML, CSS and Javascript–making Koha a truly platform-independent solution.

Free Software / Open Source:  Koha is distributed under the Free Software General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later.

No Vendor Lock-in: It is an important part of the free software promise that there is no vendor lock-in: libraries are free to install and use Koha themselves if the have the in-house expertise or to purchase support or development services from the best available sources. Libraries should be free to change support company and export their data at any time, make sure your support company allows this. For more information please visit: https://koha-community.org