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

• Website/Wiki
• Mailing list
• Translation of Koha
• Training
• Desired features
• Coding initiatives

Greece is ready for a Koha users group

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.

Greek Timeline

• 2006-2007 Quiet
• 2008 A few libraries started asking about Koha
• 2009 More libraries, HEAL-links ebooks.
• December 2009 First presentation at a Greek Conference
• 2010-2015 Interest of every kind of library
• 2016 Kohacon in Thessaloniki

Georgia felt that she need to give back, her boss said ok. So she started by translating and ran a blog called KohaGR.

What we must do

• Communicate
• Spread the news
• Have a virtual space
• Ask/Answer/Discuss
• Meet with each other
• Have an annual meeting
• Volunteer
• Public and private work together
• Companies must not be afraid to contribute
• Help those who are in need (libraries with no IT, unimarc users)
• Work together on projects
• Ask for help and ideas from other local communities

What not to do

• Exchange questions, ideas and solutions privately!!!
• Set up our installation and forget about it
• Take for granted other people’s contribution

Georgia presented so well and so passionately, that I feel really invigorated and ready to go on the hackfest.

Ron started off with a few facts about EBSCO

• EBSCO is not an ILS vendor
• 60+ ILS partnerships
• Support Koha and were a board member of OLE

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

• Open Source
• Community
• Modern
• Modular
• Support

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

• System Layer
• API layer
• Apps
• UI Toolkit

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.

Timeline

• Development now
• Mid 2016 code on github
• 2017 first base platform release, and apps released
• 2018 marketplace

To handle electronic subscriptions in Koha we have 2 options, we can either add a module to Koha. Or we can find an existing FOSS project and integrate it. Coral is an existing FOSS one, so integrating is a good choice.

There are 4 modules in Coral

Organisations

• Vendors, aggregators etc

Licensing

• Define licenses
• Enter licenses
• Import/export licenses

Usage statistics

Resources

This is where you define your resources, linking them to organisations and licenses

Because Koha and Coral are both web resources there are a few ways we can link them together. They are aiming for middle of 2017 for it to be ready.

Mengü Yazıcıoğlu spoke next about what we are pretty sure is the biggest Koha installation, a cluster serving 1132 Public libraries. (They are growing so fast it has moved from 1126 to 1132 libraries in the last 2 weeks)

They have been live on Koha for 2 years it is run as a project from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

In 2012 MCH signed with Near East University in Cyprus to migrate to Koha 2.2.x. With 900,000 users and 9,000,000 items for the migration. Lots of problems with dirty data, centralising a decentralised model meant lots of duplicates. They also had problems with infrastructure and lack of training. But they worked through this and had a system that worked well.

They made quite a few customisations and scripts to deduplicate biblios, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage estimates they saved 5,000,000 Euros on not having to have people do the deduplication alone.

In December 2015 they upgraded to Koha 3.20.x.

You can return your item anywhere in Turkey, so they make heavy use of the Koha transfers module, which tracks where any item is.

The infrastructure to run this, is a lot less than most people would think I am sure. Here is their infrastructure

This was a fascinating and amazing presentation. Started in Levin, Foxton, Shannon and Tokomaru, now … 1132 cities and towns in Turkey .. mind blowing.

She started with a demo of our bugzilla at bugs.koha-community.org and showed how to pick a bug that is testable with the sandboxes

Once you have found a bug in bugzilla, you can now go to the sandboxes to test, some sandboxes are MARC21 and some are UNIMARC, be careful to choose the appropriate one for you.

Joy started off explaining what linked data and the semantic web is, which she did about the best of anyone of I have seen do it. Did you know there is a Tutu ontology? I didn’t either.

She covered triples and gave some really good examples that showed how they are acutally used.  She covered why we should use linked data.

• Take advantage of standards
• Make library data discoverable on the web
• We need to be where the users are
• De silo our data
• MARC replacement

Challenges ahead

• Transforming the data
• Choice of URI
• Long transition
• Retraining in terminology

BIBFRAME is designed specifically for the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).

Jesse then took over to show the technical side of linked data. He started on what we can already do, with connecting our existing data to external data sources like VIAF and DBpedia.

Jesse was brave enough to do a live demo showing how we could pull in author information into a Koha details page.

It generated a lot of buzz and some good questions.

YBP is a book seller and sells mostly English language books to libraries all around the world. Both print and digital books. In 2015 they purchased by EBSCO but still focus on ebooks (not journal or discovery).

GOBI is their online system, it is how librarians, teaching faculty or anyone who makes purchasing decisions interact with YBP.

GOBI and Koha integration.

2 ways of doing intergation

1. Library places an order in GOBI, and the record is loaded into Koha
2. Place orders in Koha and push to GOBI

Future Plans

• EDIFACT
• GobiAPI: early 2017

It is a museum library, the Folkllife and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia and Thrace. They have permanent and temporary exhibitions (I want to visit this museum now). It is a small library with 8000 items, it is open to the public and has a reading room, but does not permit regular lending. The library is essential for researchers both within and without the museum.

The really like being able to store many photos, which makes it easier for researchers to be sure they have the item, before they visit the library.

Karakitsiou Chrisoula then took over to talk more about her role and impressions of Koha in FEMM-TH. It was a really interesting project they selected 3080 items and photographed all of them, front cover, back cover and table of contents page and added them to the catalogue.

FOSS Adoption is still low in Pakistan but Koha is becoming very popular in libraries due to a live DVD with DSpace and Koha on it. There has also been a lot of work done in workshops and training which have increased librarians confidence.

Some of the installed Koha in Pakistan are

1.  University of Malakand
2. Bahria University Libraries
3. Garrison Cadet College Koha
4. Higher Education Commission
5. The Islamia College University Peshawar
6. Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services
7. Sindh Madressatul Islam University
8. Quaid-e-Awam University of Engineering
9. Lawrence College Murree
10. Lahore High Court
11. Agriculture University Peshawar

He went on to explain how they integrated Koha and RFID.

It was really great to hear about how much work is being done in Pakistan.