Tag: Koha

Unsung Koha heroes – Part 3

Benedykt P. Barszcz and Pawel Skuza – Polish Pioneers

As the current translation manager, I have to give a shout out to these two. In 2001 they started the translation ball rolling, first translating Koha into Polish, then writing a script to help automate translations. This script has been almost totally rewritten (a lot of the changes by someone I will cover in another post) but the basic idea remains.

Benedykt was one of the main drivers behind localisation and internationalisation with many emails to the mailing lists on the subjects.  In the typical Free Software fashion though, they didn’t just talk but actually proved it could be done, by doing it.

So to Pawel and Benedykt, and all the people who came after that worked on localisation and translations,  Dziekuje.

Unsung Koha Heroes Part 2

The Directors of Athens County Public Libraries

Most people that are familiar with the history of the Koha ILS will have heard of Stephen Hedges, but less will be aware how influential he was in the success of Koha in the North American library space. Without his leadership and willingness to be the groundbreaker as the first Public library to go with Koha in US who knows where we would be. Of course he had people in the library recommending and supporting that decision but ultimately the buck stopped with him.

Carrying on that tradition is the current director Lauren Miller who, by allowing the marvellous Owen Leonard time and resources to work on Koha, is continuing Athens County’s mutually beneficial relationship with Koha.

Out of Athens County Public Library grew Liblime and (please liblimers correct me if I’m wrong) they were Liblime’s first client.

So much respect to Stephen Hedges, Lauren Miller … and all the other librarians and staff of Athens County Public Libraries

Do believe the hype

Unsung Koha Heroes – Part one : Olwen Williams

When I was working on the Koha history doc leading up to the presentation at Kohacon I noticed that there were some contributions that I would like to make special mention of. This of course is not to try and rank anyones contribution over anyone else’s or to detract from the already well recognised contributors. But there are some people who made significant contributions to Koha and I would like to recognise that.

Olwen Williams is a huge reason why Koha exists, without her and her knowledge of pick based systems we might still be struggling to get the data out of the old library system 🙂 She enabled Horowhenua Library Trust to feel confident, by getting the data out of their old system and getting it into the new relational database. Not content to stop there, she also wrote a significant amount of the code that was to become Koha 1.0.  She was the second person ever to commit code to Koha and occasionally still answers a question on the mailing list.

Olwen if you read this, hats off to you and thank you very much for all the hard work you put in.

Heading Home

I’m currently sitting in the airport waiting to begin my flights home, got here early as 4 of us were leaving Dallas today and it didn’t make sense to all take seperate taxis. Instead David gave us all a ride and Thomas and I watched as Paul and Nahuel checked in and cleared security. Thomas and I then had lunch and talked for a few more hours before his flight, and now I’m waiting for mine.

I just wanted to note down some things I am taking away from Kohacon 09. Apart from the things I briefly mentioned in my previous post there were a lot of other good things that happened.

Users helping users.  There was not a single session I was in where users weren’t answering questions that other users had, with the occasional help from a developer or two.

The community feel. It was to the credit of everyone involved that there was no us and them feel to the conference. Vendors, Developers and Users (sometimes all 3 being the same person :)) mixed and interacted in a way that you would not find at a proprietary software conference.

The Development Weekend. Galen Charlton deserves huge praise for the way he ran this weekend, maximising the time we had available and directing the discussions in a way such that we didn’t get bogged down. By the end of the weekend (well it was really 3 days) we had patches from 3 new developers, and Nicole was sending some of her first code patches. Bugs that had been annoying people for a while were fixed and lots of interesting discussion was had.

So a big thanks to the organisers, and to all the attendees. Videos were taken and are in the process of being converted to a format suitable of being hosted online and all the slides are planned to be linked from the wiki. So anyone who missed out on being able to be there will be able to read the slides and/or watch and listen to the presentations. The dev weekend discussions were summarised on the koha wiki also.

I’m looking forward to getting home and being with my family again, but I’m a little sad to be leaving also. A lot was achieved, mainly in building relationships, I now feel I am going home having made a lot of new friends. Our challenges are to keep the lines of communication open and public and to continue to grow our community.

Librarians, Developers, Steaks, Baseball and good friends

Kohacon 2009 is nearly over, just one day left of the developers conference tomorrow, then just Paul, Nahuel and I will be left.

As far as I’m concerned it has been a resounding success, lots of faces put to names, tons of interesting presentations, and to date a very productive development weekend.

The highlights for me

  • The enthusiasm and excitement of all the participants
  • Galen’s sense of humour.
  • Staying up late chatting with people in the Holiday Inn dining room
  • Baseball!!!!
  • Meeting people I talk to on irc almost daily
  • Catching up with Paul again and meeting Nahuel

A lot of the other attendees have done great write up’s on the individual sessions so I encourage you do check them out.

There are a ton of photos on flickr here.

Kohacon 2009 next week

I’m busy trying to tidy everything up, and to forget there is a small possibility my wife will give birth while I’m away, before I head off to Kohacon on Tuesday.

Today Kahurangi and I went out to upper hutt to Nan and Koro’s house to bake hot cross buns with Donna and Manaia. Kahu and Manaia rolled the buns and helped to put the crosses on the top, they turned out suprisingly edible.

Tomorrow is Dad’s 65th birthday party at Le Marche Francais which should be fun, then I have to go into work to grab all the things I forgot. Like my cellphone charger, headphones etc, yes I am a goober. Then I have to finish off my presentation, get an adapter for the video out on my netbook, and copy it to a usb stick just in case.

Laurel is writing me a shopping list, and I have a baseball game and numerous lunches and dinners to go to, so I’ll be pretty busy, but I’m sure it will be fun.

Request for photos of Libraries using Koha

Paul Poulain and I are doing the first presentation at Kohacon 09 which is coming up in a few weeks. As part of my part of the presentation I hoping to do a bit of a montage of libraries using Koha.

So far I have some photos from the Cook Islands, Samoa, China, Croatia, India, France and New Zealand.

So this is a call out to you Australians, Americans, Canadians, English, Germans, Polish, Hungarians, Kenyans …. and all the places I have forgotten that are using Koha. I would love to get some photos for use in the presentation. I will put up the slides and the movie online after the conference.