Next up was Mathios Stratis, talking about how in 2014 the National Library of Greece replaced Horizon with Koha. (It’s always great when you find out another National Library is using Koha).
Why did they choose Koha?
- UNIMARC Compliant
- No license restrictions and cost
- Less hardware for web based architecture
- Low maintenance cost
Timeline
- Novemeber 2013 Koha proposed
- March 21 2014 Contract signed
- April 2014 Export records
- April – September 2014 : Migration process and hardware build
- October 6 2014 : Staff training
- October 27 2014 : Koha live!
Local customisations
- Checking for unsaved changes in the MARC editor
- Vailidity checking of ISBN, ISSN, ISMN
- Spell check as you type
- Printing a summary of MARC record
- Linking Bib records through 4xx and 5xx UNIMARC fields
And many more, I missed at least 8
The customisations will soon be submitted upstream for the rest of the community to benefit from.
Problems
Delay in updating a bibliographic record when an authority record is updated
