Koha

Kohacon16 day 1 – Opting for an open source ILS : AUTh Library’s transition to Koha

Theodoros Theodoropoulos gave us a quick run down on first on the history of the University

University

Founded in 1925
11 faculties / 41 schools
334km
60K+ students
2k+ staff
4019 employees

Library

Founded in 1927
Largest academic library, and 2nd largest library in greece
50 branches
1.3 phyiscal itmes in 90 collections
300k ebooks
28k active users
120 employess
200k transactions per year

The library has moved everyting to FOSS, the last 2 to move were Blackboard -> Moodle and Horizon to Koha.

He then gave us a history of the ILS at AUTh

1927-90 – card catalogues mostly
1990 – PTOLEMAEUS I
1994 – PTOLEMAEUS II
2000-2015 – Horizon (lots of problems in the first few years, 2004 they finally got to a stable version and stuck with it since then)

Why they had to change

Horizon product line is killed by SirsiDynix
EOL, no updates and no support
Java requirements meant horrible security situation
Client was made for XP, and crashes in windows 7

Closed or Open Source

Planning since 2009
Greek library consortium not specifically
seeking an open source ILS – most likely will end up proprietary. Would be client-server, would cost up to 150k Euro a year and they were worried about support. In 2014 Sierra won the tender
AUTh Univeristy had a strong tendency with F/OSS

Ok, But which Open Source ILS

About a dozen candidates
Only a few fully featured
Most have simplistic interfaces
Evergreen and Koha shortlisted

Supports marc21
excellent compatibility with test export files
supported all main modules
Greek/Unicode support
Worldwide
Web based
Source code, docs, wiki open
LTS and regular releases
Plugins etc

Tenders in Dec 2013, go live Sepetmber 2015

Challenges they faced

Mostly to do with data coming out of Horizon in hard to use formats. Biblibre wrote scripts to tidy the data before loading it into Koha. The hardest was Borrowers/Patron. More than 50% of the borrowers didn’t have an email address. Performance was an issue, the catalogue search was the worst issue.

Conclusions

Everyworked pretty much, no major or blocking issues. Some issues were reported and most are fixed. Still some pending issues, mostly optimisations and enhancments. But they are happy with their choice.

Kohacon16 Day 1 – The application of FOSS in Libraries: a hope through the crisis

Prodromos Tsiavos – UCL the Media Institute, UK

After Paul and I talked, and some great coffee, we have Prodromos Tsiavos (@prodromos) from University College London talking about FOSS in libraries in the very challenging environment libraries are in.

He started by talking about Software (Free Software in particular) and noting that Software is not about code, it is about people and organisations. So we should be paying attention to the ecosystem, and the things that allow people and organistaions to flourish.

Software and Humans.

Software is

Built collectively
Knowledge intensive
A Learning Experience
Infrastructure dependent
Institution building

FOSS encompasses tremendous amount of value

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He also made the point that to do it properly, your code needs to be open from the beginning, Release Early, Release Often.

Legal

Licensing was talked about briefly, and he touched on the Trademark issues also. He said, choose a license that represents the values of your community, and when you have a name Trademark it. He talked for a bit about things that look like open source, or are marketed as, but that have a license that isn’t open.

So when you look at all this, you can see that FOSS is Collective Activity, that is Human Centric, it brings Sustainability and should be a part of a broader strategy.

Developing a FOSS Strategy

People and roles
Find other communities
Procurement – Buy hours not products : Buying locally, local labour, is so important especially in times of financial crisis.
Releases
Link to as many people/organisations as possible
Develop polices, PR policies, standards, events, ecosystem around the software

FOSS in libraries

Part of a broader FOSS strategy
Not just cost reduction
Develop sustainable experties
Link to R & D
Relate to open science and open data
It’s a knowledge instrument

Kohacon16 – Day 1 – Welcome

After a walk from the hotel (30 mins is a bit too far in this heat) we got to Aristotle University and completed registration for the conference.

The first session for the day was a welcome to the conference, followed by Paul and I talking about the history of Koha.

Giannis welcomed us all, more than 270 people registered from more than 30 countries. He made a point of thanking the University for their help. Then the Vice Rector of the University spoke about the university, and how it was 90 years old. As the biggest university in Greece, it is important to connect to the outside world, and that they were proud to host the conference. The head of the Libraries then spoke, unfortunately my Greek is non existent so I didn’t catch most of what she said.

Giannis then thanked the sponsors, without whom this conference couldn’t have taken place.

My list of conference presentations

I realised the other day, I was losing track of the conference presentations I have given. So in order to have a list somewhere I decided to write one here. I’ll update it as I have changes.

2003 Think Linux – Toledo, OH, USA : Conference Program
2006 Linux Conf Australia – Dunedin, NZ : From New Zealand to Bolivia, the Koha Library system flies.
2006 Kohacon6 – Paris, France : https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/koha-devel/2006-03/msg00102.html
2009 Kohacon9 – Plano, TX, USA : He Taonga mō tātou
2009 LIANZA – Christchurch, NZ : Koha 3.2 : The Next Step
2010 Linux Conf Australia – Wellington, NZ : Koha – Nau te rourou, naku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi, OGG, OGV
2010 Kohacon10 – Wellington, NZ : What’s new in Koha 3.4
2011 SLIS Wellington – Wellington NZ : Open Sourcing and Māori Consultation
2011 Access – Vancouver, BC, Canada : Tātou tātou: Caring and sharing in a Free and Open source Project
2011 LIANZA – Wellington, NZ : Paul Neilson, Cath Sheard and Chris Cormack: Te Ihi, Te Wehi, Te Wana = Koha
2011 Interviewed for INN530 – Queensland Uni of Technology : Kate Davis Interviews Chris Cormack about Open Source Software
2012 Te Rōpū Whakahau – Auckland, NZ : New Ways of Talking: Māori and Technology
2012 Kohacon12 – Edinburgh, Scotland : It’s All About The People, Template::Toolkit made my coffee
2013 Kohacon13 – Reno, NV, USA : He waka eke noa – A brief history of the Koha project, Best Practices For Deploying Koha, Yes, but what have you done for me lately?
2013 EIFL-FLOSS – Webinar
2014 Supporting Cultural Heritage Open Source Software Symposium – Atlanta, GA, USA : FOSS Project Governance
2014 NDF Barcamp, Palmerston North, NZ : What can we do with open source and some imagination
2014 Learning with Digital Technologies Symposium – Auckland NZ : How does my area of expertise (or particular experience) contribute to my ability to be critical, collaborative, and creative- digitally?
2014 Kohacon14 – Cordoba, Argentina : Koha History, How to welcome newcomers
2015 Open Source Open Society, Wellington, NZ : A really really brief history of Koha, Can open technology, society, and culture remove barriers to human sharing and create a thriving commons-based future?
2015 Digital Nati, Gisborne, NZ : The ICT Industry and its potential
2015 Kohacon15 – Ibadan, Nigeria : Koha – History, Privacy and Koha, RFID and Koha
2016 Linux Conf Australia – Geelong, VIC, Australia : He aha te mea nui?
2016 National Koha Conclave – Bangalore, India : Koha History, The road ahead, Opensource ERM

I think that’s all of them, if you know of any I’ve missed please let me know

3 Conferences in 3 weeks

Somehow (most likely due to my inability to say no) I ended up attending 3 conferences (and speaking at 2 of them) in 3 weeks. Two of them in Australia and the third in India. Apart from being really really tiring they were all great.

First up was Linux Conference Australia, held in Geelong (an hour out of Melbourne). It was a full week conference, with the first 2 days being miniconfs then the next three conference proper. I attended Open Source and Bioinformatics, and the Community Leadership Summit X at LA miniconfs. They were both excellent, Bioinformatics was something I knew nothing about beforehand so I learned a lot. The Community Leadership summit was really good, due mostly to the attendees. The programme was great as it always is. I spoke on Thursday, I think it went ok, there was a good write up at LWN. The social track was a highlight (drinks in a brewery are always fun) as well and I met and talked to a lot of lovely people.

Next up, I caught the train to Melbourne, and enjoyed some of the lunar new year festivities over the weekend.

On Monday, we gave an Intro to Koha talk in Melbourne, which was really well attended.

Followed by a bunch of meetings then a Koha user group meetup and dinner after. The Koha user group meets in the Melbourne Athenaeum, a fantastic place.

The next three days were the VALA conference, a definite change of pace to LCA, but interesting nonetheless. I didn’t get any photos during the conference, but of course I got some photos of some of the fantastic food on offer in Southbank.

On Friday Kris and I visited the National gallery, which had a great exhibition of Warhol and Ai Weiwei, then flew back to NZ. I had the weekend with my family, and on Monday morning flew out to India to the National Koha Conclave.

Catalyst Open Source Academy 2016 – Koha Group

Once again the Catalyst Open Source Academy was a great success. Thanks of course to the students, but also the tutors, mentors and organisers. I won’t talk too much about the first week here, I am sure that will be covered by others, but I wanted to talk about all the work the Koha team got done.

I had a great group of students, who worked really hard and got a lot done. The group work started great as the first day was Chloe’s birthday and she brought in a delicious cheesecake.

Myself, Aleisha and others from the Koha community had prepared around 40 issues for the students to work on. But by the end of the day they had already dealt 14 of them and were speeding up. This was just in the afternoon, as getting a working development environment took most of the moring. Which meant I spent the evening finding more work to do, not a bad problem to have.

Day 1

Setting up the development environment
12 new patches for bugs
2 existing patchsets signed off

For day 2 I had what I thought were trickier issues that should take most of the day to solve, but nope they still got through way more than I expected.

Day 2

Made new favicons for the Koha wiki
Some html/css changes to scoreboard.koha-community.org
Changed the theme on the Koha dashboard back to normal, not xmas
16 new patches for bugs
4 existing patchsets signed off

After another evening of scrambling to make sure I had plenty of stuff for them to do, we got into day 3. I had actually managed to get some quite tricky ones, which meant that although it looks they did less, they actually worked just as hard, but to solve much trickier problems

Day 3

Fixing up any of their patches that had failed QA previously
9 new patches
1 existing patchset signed off

Onto the final day, this was just a half day, as the afternoon was taken up with the students presenting what they had done, and a capture the flag security competition.

For something different, I got them to use Gource to create a movie visualisation of the work they had done that week. Here are two of them

They also signed off a few more patches, and even added a few new patches also.

In summary they were a super productive group of 4 young people, and I hope they continue with their interest in IT, the NZ IT community would be lucky to have them. Here are some quick stats from git.

39 patchsets created
A total of 271 lines added, 95 removed (delta 176)

All of them have at least one patch in Koha now, and I expect that of those 39 patches, almost all of them will make it in.

I just want to finish with a big thanks to Aleisha and Francesca who helped out a lot, and to Kathryn, Liz and Lucio who held down the fort upstairs.

Oh and here’s some pics of “Chris pointing at things” It seems I do this a lot at the academy.

All pictures in this post are Copyright Catalyst Open Source 2016 – Licensed CC-BY-SA (2.0)

Unsung heroes of Koha – Compilation

I’ve decided to put a list, that I will keep updated to make it easier to find the unsung heroes posts, so here goes

My 2015 in pictures

2015 was a really busy year for me, I’m sure I’ll forget lots in doing this run down, but I’ll try to do one anyway. The year started pretty shittily, with Laurel being ill, but we soldiered on and enjoyed some cricket anyway

RT @MeganCampbellNZ: Awesome Father-son beige brigade @blackcaps #NZvSL pic.twitter.com/gTphIydqEp @BeigeBrigade

— BLACKCAPS (@BLACKCAPS) January 2, 2015

The Catalyst Open Source Academy again went well, with the group working on Koha getting a lot done.

Photo by Catalyst Media CC-BY-SA

The boys and I went on a trip to the Hawkes Bay at the end of January which was a ton of fun, splash planet is great fun with kids. One of the highlights for Te Pō Atarau was getting to feed a lamb.

In February we went to watch the Jousting at Harcourt park and the kids got to try archery.

In April, Te Pō Atarau invented which might be the most complicated game I have ever tried to play

And I presented at the Open Source Open Society conference.

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND – April 17: OSOS conference April 17, 2015 in Wellington, New Zealand. (Photo by Mark Tantrum/ mark tantrum.com)

I turned 42 in May and Te Pō Atarau turned 6. I also went up the coast to participate in the Digital Nati sessions, which was great.

The highlight of June for me was the kid’s disco which I live tweeted.

July was busy with Matariki, and my favourite Kaumatua kapa haka, as well as Armageddon and Māori language week.

August was about the quietest month of the year, but then in September we went to Fiji and the US.

We got back in October, and 4 days later I flew out to Kohacon15 in Nigeria, which was a totally amazing trip

November was the LIANZA conference.

Kahurangi turned 9.

And we had Island food O’clock for one of our beer o’clocks at work.

And December was Kiwicon and of course Christmas

Unsung heroes of Koha 31 – Marc Véron

Marc has been working on Koha since 2012 (maybe even 2011) and has grown into an extremely valued member of the community. He puts a huge amount of work into testing and writing patches. Just in 2015 he has had 125 patches that he had authored pushed into Koha, changing 5199 lines of code. But that’s not all, he tested and signed off on 231 bug/enhancements in bugzilla. Not to mention answering mails on the mailing list and attending community meetings on IRC. And if that wasn’t enough he works on the German translation, and a Swiss German translation of Koha also.

I first met Marc in person at Kohacon12 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

And soon learned that he’s a genuinely lovely person, and a great asset to the community. Thanks Marc for all your hard work, and may 2016 be an even better year for you.

Tschüss (as they say in your homeland :))

Kohacon15 – Nigeria – Round up (You should have been here)

As is the trend for all Kohacon, this was the best Kohacon yet. Not only was the venue great, but so were the people and the presentations.

It flew by so fast (that’s how you know it was interesting) and we covered so many topics. From Automation uptake in Nigeria, to sysadmin tips, to RFID, to digital resources and so much more.

One of the major takeaways for me was the passion and the willingness to discuss and share ideas. There certainly are challenges here, with unreliable power, not great internet, and of course as it is libraries, funding. But what there isn’t here is any sense of fatality, people are working hard to make things better, and to serve their users to the best of their ability.

Apart from the conference proper, for the cultural day we went to ‘The Sacred Grove in Osogbo, Osun” which is a world heritage site, and for good reason.

We probably didn’t get as much done at the hackfest as we could have, but the internet made that a little hard. We did though explore some monitoring tools that can help deal with the symptoms of the unreliable power. I hope that it was some use to the participants.

In conclusion, I would like to say it was an honour for me to be here, I hope that I provided some useful information for others, I certainly learnt from them. A big e se to Projectlink Konsult, and to my work Catalyst for making it possible for me to come. And e se to all the other participants who made the conference what it was.

You should have been here.