Just random ranting and raving
Not only does Joy describe Bibframe by using the ontology of Tutu, but she probably currently knows the most about data migrations to Koha. This would be neat in itself, but she never hesitates to share this knowledge by answering questions on the mailing lists, attending and speaking at Kohacons, and participating on IRC.
Joy is a person of great integrity and she brings that to her work on Koha. The community and the project are lucky to have her.
I have never met Josef, but according to git it has been 685 days since his first patch was accepted into the Koha code base. He now has 42 patches with a total of nearly 3000 lines changed, which in itself is a great achievement. But even more importantly, Josef is a committed tester. He is currently leading the number of sign offs for April, and is second only to Marc Véron (unsung hero number 31) in terms of sign offs for 2017.
Jo Ransom met Josef in the Czech Republic while on her Koha world tour and speaks highly of him. If I have this correctly he works for a University that has been using Koha for quite a few years now. It is so great to see users becoming contributors also.
Děkuji Josef
I did a little infographic showing a brief summary of 2016 for the Koha project, hope it is useful/fun for someone.
As most of you will know I have been working on Koha since 1999. Most of you will also know that without others at the beginning like Rachel, Simon, Olwen, Rosalie and Jo Koha would simply not exist. What people people might not be aware of though is that the one person who has been with me throughout the whole 18 years, that Koha has been worked on, is my wife Laurel.
She wasn’t my wife when I started in fact we had only recently met. But the stories of my Koha journey are intertwined with my relationship with Laurel. Without her constant support I would have given up a long time ago. A few years ago I wrote an unsung heroes of Koha post about Laurel.
Without her support I would never have been to travel the places I have, do the work on Koha I do in the weekends and evenings and so much more.
All of this is a long lead in to say that now Laurel needs your help (only if you are in a position where you can of course). Laurel is an art educator and an artist. Neither of which, unless you are incredibly fortunate, are careers that provide much in the way of financial rewards.
Laurel has battled a lot of health problems throughout her life and her art is one way she deals with it. She is currently working on 2 shows to exhibit
And is currently fundraising to cover a small part of the costs. We’d love to be able to cover the costs ourselves but unfortunately we can’t. So if you want to help Laurel out (and be part of making some fantastic art) which indirectly helps me out, which indirectly helps Koha out, please do. And if you don’t we’re still friends 🙂
Sofia Zapounidou followed Georgia’s talk, Georgia had made a fantastic case for the need for people to collaborate. So Sofia followed it up with the how this might happen.
They looked at the other local user groups around the world and what they did. Then they tried to find out what other libraries in Greece are using Koha, there are much more than people know about. They did a survey of these libraries to find out what people wanted to do
Greece is ready for a Koha users group
Georgia Katsarou then spoke about the history of Koha usage in Greece. She started by introducing where she works, a library in a school called College Year in Athens.
They started with a card catalogue, and then moved to Access (the students like the card catalogue much better). In 2006 they moved to Koha.
Georgia felt that she need to give back, her boss said ok. So she started by translating and ran a blog called KohaGR.
Georgia presented so well and so passionately, that I feel really invigorated and ready to go on the hackfest.
Ron Burns from EBSCO was up next to talk about what EBSCO is doing with their Open Source library platform.
Ron started off with a few facts about EBSCO
Then he talked about the current proprietary Library Service Platforms, and likened them to an old set of anitque drawers. And also touched on how they are monoliths and with the bundling of discovery .. leads to lock in. When you factor in the consolidation, there is a real lack of choice for libraries.
The new FOSS LSP should be modular and modern. Ron reminded us that open source drives innovation, so of course they should build with open source.
Folio (the new LSP) is built with a focus on
They decided to choose the Apache 2 License and copyright transfer to the Open Library Foundation. The community at this point is Kuali OLE, some libraries, Index Data, industry partners, EBSCO.
The architecture will look someting like
He did a really good job of a high level view of what it might look like. If you look up the presentation online you will get a much better idea than I can impart.
Where does Koha fit? The Koha community can decide that.
