Koha Community Newsletter
April 2013

Volume 4, Issue 4
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10.5 Released
  • Koha 3.8.12 Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Release Team for Koha 3.14 Elected
  • Olly Olly Oxen Free: Integrators with Koha, Stand Up and be Counted
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • May General IRC Meeting
  • Limoges Koha Event
  • KohaCon13 Big Update
• Past Koha Events
  • April General IRC Meeting
  • Marseille Hackfest

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.5 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.10.5. This is a stable release and contains many bugfixes.

Koha 3.10.5 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.12 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha community is proud to announce the release of 3.8.12. This is a maintenance release and contains many bugfixes.

Koha 3.8.12 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for March 2013.

Release Team for Koha 3.14 Elected
by Liz Rea

The Koha Community is pleased to announce the release team for Koha version 3.14 (code name Pi). The team includes volunteers from nine countries and represents Koha support companies and libraries from around the world.

• Release Manager: Galen Charlton, USA, Equinox
• Translation Manager: D Ruth Bavousett, USA
• Documentation Manager, Database Doc Manager: Nicole Engard, USA, ByWater Solutions
• Installation Documentation Managers: Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha; Samuel Desseaux, France
• Quality Assurance Manager: Katrin Fischer, Germany, BSZ
• Quality Assurance Team: Marcel de Rooy, Netherlands, Rijksmuseum; Chris Cormack, New Zealand, Catalyst IT; Jonathan Druart, France, BibLibre; Brendan Gallagher, USA, ByWater Solutions; Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha; Paul Poulain, France, BibLibre; Kyle M Hall, USA, ByWater Solutions
• Release Maintainers: 3.12.x: Tomás Cohen Arazi, Argentina, UNC; 3.10.x: Bernardo Gonzalez Kriegel, Argentina; 3.8.x: Chris Hall, New Zealand, Catalyst IT
• Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat, New Zealand, Catalyst IT
• Live CD/DVD Manager: Nguyen Quoc Uy, Vietnam
• VM Manager: Samuel Desseaux, France
• Bug Wrangler: Magnus Enger, Norway, Libriotech
• Newsletter Editor: Daniel Grobani, USA, Samuel Merritt University

Thanks to our volunteers, and here’s to a successful 3.14 Release!

P.S. No, it’s not really code name Pi. But it could be!

Olly Olly Oxen Free: Integrators with Koha, Stand Up and be Counted
by Galen Charlton

Does your project, service, or product interact with Koha in some automated fashion? If so, we’d like to hear from you.

I’m using the phrase “automated fashion” very broadly. There are many ways to receive data from a Koha system, update data in a Koha database, or make transactions happen. A few of these ways include:

• RESTful web service calls
• SIP2 to perform patron and circulation requests
• Z39.50, unAPI, and OpenSearch to retrieve catalog data
• LDAP to authenticate patrons
• MARC exports and imports
• Screen-scraping (although if you’re screen-scraping Koha, we may be able to suggest a better way to do it)
• Direct database access
• And others

Some of the things we’d like to know include:

• The name of your service or product
• What it does for a Koha library
• How it is accessing Koha
• Whether there are specific APIs or entry points that your application depends on
• If there are things that Koha could be doing to make your life easier

We want to hear from everybody, whether you are a library that has integrated Koha with other software, a Koha support group, a vendor providing products or services to libraries, or a member of a free software project whose software talks with Koha. If you work for a Koha library and know that Koha works with another service, we want to hear from you too, even if you don’t know how Koha is doing the talking.

Why do we want to know? Our reasons include:

• Finding out which entry points we should be particularly careful about changing as Koha gets enhanced.
• Seeing if there are things we could be doing better to encourage more people and applications to participate in the Koha ecosystem.
• (Maybe) putting together a list of third-party services that interact with Koha.

To respond, please comment on this post.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Pelham Public Library (USA) via ByWater Solutions
• Sterling College (USA) via ByWater Solutions
• Texas Library Consortium (USA) via ByWater Solutions

Community Gossip

Nguyen Quoc Uy is working to promote Koha in Vietnam. He’s joined the 3.14 release team and created a website to share Koha resources in Vietnamese.

Jessica Tobin of the Arnold Library in Seattle will be participating in a panel presentation on libraries’ experiences with open source ILS’s at the 2013 Washington Library Association/Oregon Library Association (WLA/OLA) conference in Vancouver, WA, on April 26.

Chris Cormack has used jqPlot to add a new graph to the Koha Dashboard showing the totals of the last 7 days’ bug activity.

Kenza, a student, has been hired for the summer by BibLibre and will be devoting all her time to Koha community work.

Jesse Weaver, A.K.A. pianohacker, has been hired for the summer by ByWater Solutions and will be devoting all his time to Koha community work. Jesse may also be joining the Quality Assurance Team for the summer.

Owen Leonard submitted a patch for Koha bug 10,000.

Mark Johnson of OSS Watch has posted an account of the LibLime/PTFS/Community rift and lessons for those involved with open source projects.

La traduction de la newsletter Koha Communautaire de mars 2013 viennent d’être publiées sur Koha-fr.

Christine Park is seeking panelists for the California Academic and Research Library Association’s October webinar, “So you’re thinking of upgrading your ILS”. If your library has recently switched its ILS and you’d like to share your experience with others, see Christine’s call for panelists.

Karam Qubsi reports that Koha master and 3.12 now support RTL (for right-to-left languages) “like never before.”

Support Provider News

David Noe has joined ByWater Solutions as Koha Migrations Specialist.

BibLibre has launched a Koha demonstration site, with access to both a staff interface and an OPAC. More info is here.

ByWater Solutions has posted a page on Koha’s new plugin system.

Upcoming Koha Events

May General IRC Meeting

The May general IRC meeting will be held on 7 May 2013 at 02:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Limoges Koha Event

Symposium Koha 2013 will be held in Limoges 24-26 June 2013. More info is here.

KohaCon13 Big Update
by Nancy Keener, KohaCon13 Chair

KohaCon13, the international users’ conference of the Koha open-source library system, will be held October 16–22 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, USA.

We are going to have a great conference. Registration is free! Please consider joining us to learn about Koha, the community, and what libraries are doing with Koha around the world. Talks will range from introductory to advanced and will be geared toward Koha users, developers, and fans.

We had our fourth IRC planning meeting on 23 April.

We currently have 38 people registered. We need to have all hotel reservations made by September 15th to get the free meeting rooms and AV equipment.

19 programs have been proposed so far:

• training
• 14 years of the Koha project
• hardware requirements for standard and virtual servers
• accessing all library materials at one time with VuFind
• round table discussions on all modules
• using telephone notification in Koha
• Koha live USB for LIS teaching purposes
• Libki demo
• plug-ins
• accessing all library materials at one time with DSpace
• testing and signing off on bugs
• history of Koha
• community organization
• Koha use cases
• new web services and Drupal integration
• a Nevada cultural moment
• serials management on a shoestring
• open source ERMSs
• GoKB

We would like a few more people to volunteer to offer a program. And if you don’t see a program you think we need, please email me.

Galen Charlton, our next Release Manager, will be our opening speaker. Megan Conelly, a Washoe County Librarian, will be our Mistress of Ceremonies.

Thursday night will be the Nevada Library Association (NLA) President’s reception at the Downtown Reno library branch, which is directly north of the Atlantis via a short bus ride. This special event will feature beer, wine, and food and will most likely cost US$20.

27 people have expressed interest in a Saturday road trip, so that is going forward. We are investigating Tahoe, Squaw Valley, Virginia City, University of Nevada, and Reno Makerspace.

We are preparing to send out sponsorship invitations to vendors, inviting them to sponsor food for our break times, buses for our Saturday trips, or just to give money. Sponsors will be acknowledged before and during the conference. We will be asking local restaurants for discounts. More information will be on the KohaCon13 website soon.

Vendors requesting booth space at KohaCon13 are being directed to our NLA friends who will be just next door. There will be a table for brochures, and of course our attendees will be welcome to visit NLA vendors.

A lot of libraries have migrated to Koha in the last year. KohaCon13 is the best place to see what is going on and to meet all of the people who help keep Koha the best ILS out there. It just happens to be open source!

Learn more about KohaCon13 on the official conference site.

Past Koha Events

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting was held on 3 April 2013.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Marseille Hackfest

A Koha hackfest was held at BibLibre’s office in Marseille in March. Brendan Gallagher wrote about his experience of the event.

Koha Community Newsletter
March 2013

Volume 4, Issue 3
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10.4 Released
  • Koha 3.8.11 Released
  • Koha 3.12 Beta Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Koha 3.12 Release Manager’s Newsletter
  • Live DVD Blueprint
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • April General IRC Meeting
  • KohaCon13 Registration and Call for Speakers
  • Italian Koha Event
• Past Koha Events
  • March General IRC Meeting

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.4 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team, in association with the multitude of Koha libraries, librarians, support companies, developers, and users, are proud to announce the release of the latest stable release of the 3.10.x branch, 3.10.4.

This maintenance release contains code from 15 people from 12 different organisations, once again a great example of international and inter-company collaboration and making the official and community-supported Koha live up to its promise of no single-vendor lock-in.

Koha 3.10.4 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.11 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team, in association with the multitude of Koha libraries, librarians, support companies, developers, and users, are proud to announce the release of the latest stable release of the 3.8.x branch, 3.8.11.

This maintenance release contains code from 12 people from 9 different organisations, once again a great example of international and inter-company collaboration and making the official and community-supported Koha live up to its promise of no single-vendor lock-in.

Koha 3.8.11 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball. Packages are here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.12 Beta Released

Jared Camins-Esakov has released a beta version of Koha 3.12 and an accompanying announcement. Key points:

• Koha has to be translated.
• Koha’s documentation has to be updated.
• Koha’s installation instructions need to be updated.
• Enhancement bugs need to be reclassified.
• Open bug reports need to be (re)confirmed.
• Bugs need to be fixed.
• Bug fixes need to be tested.
• Volunteers must be found, recruited, and/or made for 3.14.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for February 2013, Koha 3.10.4, and Koha 3.8.11

Koha 3.12 Release Manager’s Newsletter

3.12 Release Manager Jared Camins-Esakov has posted his second quarterly missive.

Live DVD Blueprint

A blueprint for development of the Koha Live DVD has been posted to the wiki.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Roseville Public Library (USA) via ByWater Solutions
• 3 New VOKAL Libraries (USA) via ByWater Solutions

Community Gossip

Galen Charlton has been named one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers 2013! (Occasioning the rare use of an exclamation point in this newsletter).

Galen, in but one display of his moving & shaking, has written a number of posts on his recently reactivated blog.

Chris Fitzpatrick is working on integrating Koha and Blacklight.

Chris Cormack is working on integrating Goodreads reviews into Koha.

Volkan Sönmez at the Süleyman Demirel Üniversity Library in Isparta, Turkey, has posted to the wiki instructions in Turkish on installing Koha 3.10 on Centos 6.3 x86 64.

Nicole Engard has posted advice for beginners in the Koha community, a video on making screencasts for bug/ticket reporting, and a diagram explaining the Koha development cycle.

Don Christie tweeted about Marshall Breeding’s map of worldwide registered Koha sites.

Support Provider News

The Galecia Group has posted an Open Source ILS Feature Comparison Tool.

iZi Software in Malaysia has been added to the community’s directory of paid support providers.

Joy Nelson has been named Director of Migrations at ByWater Solutions.

Upcoming Koha Events

April General IRC Meeting

The April general IRC meeting will be held on 3 April 2013 at 10:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

KohaCon13 Registration and Call for Speakers
by Nicole Engard

Registration for KohaCon13, the international users’ conference of the Koha open-source library system, is now open! KohaCon13 will be held October 16–22 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, USA and registration is free!

Please consider joining us to learn about Koha, about the community, and about what libraries are doing with Koha around the world. Also consider sharing your story with us by speaking. The call for speakers is open and available here. Talks will range from introductory to advanced and will be geared toward Koha users, developers, and fans.

Learn more about KohaCon13 on the official conference site.

Italian Koha Event

Hyperborea and the Biblioteca Franco Serantini are organizing an event dedicated to Koha on 19 April in Pisa. More info is here.

Past Koha Events

March General IRC Meeting

The March general IRC meeting was held on 13 March 2013.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Koha Community Newsletter
February 2013

Volume 4, Issue 2
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10.3 Released
  • Koha 3.8.10 Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Koha 3.12 Timeline
  • Koha 3.14 Roles
  • Koha Support for Mozilla Persona
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Naval Marine Archive on Koha
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • March General IRC Meeting
  • Marseille Hackfest
  • Italian Koha Meeting
  • KohaCon13 Registration and Call for Speakers
• Past Koha Events
  • February General IRC Meeting

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.3 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team, in association with the many developers and users who have had input, are happy to announce the release of Koha version 3.10.3.

This is a bugfix/maintenance release and is the latest stable release of the Koha 3.10.x series.

Koha 3.10.3 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.10 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team, in association with the many developers and users who have had input, are happy to announce the release of Koha version 3.8.10.

This is a bugfix/maintenance release and is the latest stable release of the Koha 3.8.x series.

Koha 3.8.10 can be downloaded here; installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for the Koha 3.10.1 release.

Koha 3.12 Timeline
by Jared Camins-Esakov

We are now less than three months out from the 3.12 release. In light of the implacable march of time, I wanted to provide an update on the release timeline for Koha 3.12. There are four important dates:

• March 15 – Feature slush. Any patch adding a new feature or enhancement which has not already been attached to a bug on Bugzilla (or submitted to Koha via git branch) will not be considered for inclusion in Koha 3.12.
• March 22 – Feature freeze. No further features or enhancements will be pushed. It will be bugfixes only from here on out. This will allow our Documentation Manager to revise the help files to reflect the features of 3.12 prior to the string freeze, below.
• May 1 – String freeze. No patch (other than security patches) changing translatable strings will be accepted for Koha 3.12.0.
• May 22. – Release. Koha 3.12.0 will be released and the 3.12 branch handed off to the 3.12 Release Maintainer. Depending on the preferences of the 3.14 RM, 3.12 may be branched on May 22, or 3.12 may be branched earlier

Reminder: we have a lot of patches that need attention from testers. As of now, 158 patches are waiting for sign off, and 116 patches are waiting for QA. Most are enhancements or new features, but there are also a bunch of bugfixes in there. Let’s try to get all the worthy patches we already have into 3.12!

Koha 3.14 Roles

Community members who would like to assume any of the roles for the Koha 3.14 release are welcome to add their name to the list of roles on the wiki and, optionally, add and link to a proposal.

Koha Support for Mozilla Persona
by Chris Cormack

I’m pleased to say you can now use Mozilla Persona to log into a Koha public interface. It works by matching the email address the borrower has set as their primary email with the user logged into Persona. Since applications like Drupal and Mahara also support Persona, you can implement a simple single sign on solution with very minimal effort. But the main win is we allow borrowers to login without needing to remember yet another username and password.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Tikokino School (New Zealand) via Anact Open Source Solutions

Naval Marine Archive on Koha

We are pleased to announce that our library catalogue is now online. It currently contains over 20,000 books – all that remains to be done is to catalogue the remaining 15,000 books, 250,000 magazines and journals, 2,000 charts, several hundred paintings and engravings, and all the other documents, files, and manuscripts at “The Victory.”

Importantly, our Canadian archive is now formally accepted as an international library (CaOPIACS) and has access to major libraries for automatic retrieval (Z39.50) of their bibliographic records. Reciprocal use of our records by other libraries is planned in the near future.

This online library project has been achieved by an investment of about 1,400 hours of volunteer time into designing and implementing the system (including limited import of some of our spreadsheets), and continues with between 20 and 40 volunteer hours per week in cataloguing. In-house testing continues to make progress on the very complex matters surrounding efficient cataloguing of our periodicals; we tentatively plan on putting these fully on-line by mid-2013, but in the meanwhile all work stations in the library have access to this work-in-progress.

Technically, it involves a new 64-bit web server running a Linux operating system on our premises with enhanced internet connectivity. This has allowed us to develop a customized version of the Koha open-source library system.

Community Gossip

Catalyst Academy students have updated the Kiritaki Koha Android app.

Les traductions de la newsletter Koha Communautaire de décembre 2012 et janvier 2013 viennent d’être publiées sur Koha-fr.

KohaAloha reports that Marshall Breeding‘s list of 2013 ILS turnover shows a great deal of migration to Koha so far this year.

Nicole Engard, Koha Documentation Manager, has won an Opensource.com People’s Choice Award for her article “Should we require that open source is developed openly?”.

Koha Gruppo Italiano is a new Facebook group for the Italian Koha community.

Ruth Bavousett reports that she’s accepted a position outside the library community and will be leaving ByWater Solutions on March 8. She will continue to serve as Translation Manager for the rest of the 3.12 release cycle and intends to remain involved with Koha after that.

Elliott Davis reports that he, too, will be leaving ByWater Solutions, on March 18, and he intends to complete his term on the Quality Assurance team.

Vinod Kumar Mishra has released EasyKoha, a live DVD based on Koha 3.8.9 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Support Provider News

BibLibre has posted a list of contributions to open source projects it made in 2012.

Chris Cormack and Don Christie of Catalyst IT will be talking about Koha at the Public Libraries Western Australia biennial conference.

Upcoming Koha Events

March General IRC Meeting

The March general IRC meeting will be held on 13 March 2013 at 18:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Marseille Hackfest
by Pierre Vandekerckhove

The third HackFest Koha will take place in BibLibre‘s office in Marseille from 18 to 22 March. Here is a little overview of the program and the list of those who have already decided to come.

38 participants are registered: 18 staff members of BibLibre, 3 staff members of ByWater Solutions from the USA, 11 others from France, and one each from Germany, Italy, Croatia, Norway, and Portugal. The French participants will be coming from Aix Marseille Université, the BULAC, la Dracénie, the IEP, Lyon 2, Lyon 3, Mines Paristech, the BM of Nimes, Rennes 2, and the San Ouest Provence.

The program of these five days dedicated to Koha includes workshops about ergonomy, database, and search rewrite. Other workshop topics will be added, depending on the desires and ideas from the participants.

If you wish to come or just to ask a question about the HackFest, just email Paul Poulain.

To follow or discuss the event on Twitter, please use the hashtag #HFK13 (for HackFest Koha 2013).

Photos from the HackFest Koha 2012 are here.

Italian Koha Meeting
by Zeno Tajoli

The third Italian Koha meeting will be Friday 15 March from 14.00 to 17.00 at Bibliostar, the Italian libraries fair taking place in Milan, 14/15 March 2012. More info will be sent to the general Koha mailing list and to AIB-CUR, the main Italian mailing list for librarians. More Information on Bibliostar is here.

KohaCon13 Registration and Call for Speakers
by Nicole Engard

Registration for KohaCon13, the international users’ conference of the Koha open-source library system, is now open! KohaCon13 will be held October 16–22 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, USA and registration is free!

Please consider joining us to learn about Koha, about the community, and about what libraries are doing with Koha around the world. Also consider sharing your story with us by speaking. The call for speakers is open and available here. Talks will range from introductory to advanced and will be geared toward Koha users, developers, and fans.

Learn more about KohaCon13 on the official conference site.

Past Koha Events

February General IRC Meeting

The February general IRC meeting was held on 7 February 2013.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Koha Community Newsletter
January 2013

Volume 4, Issue 1
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10.2 Released
  • Koha 3.8.9 Released
  • Koha Live CD Lite Released
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Koha Migration in Turkey
  • Augustan Society Library on Koha
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • February General IRC Meeting
  • Marseille Hackfest
• Past Koha Events
  • January General IRC Meeting

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.2 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.10.2.

This is the latest bugfix/maintenance release of the Koha 3.10.x series.

Koha 3.10.2 can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.9 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.9.

This is the latest bugfix/maintenance release of the Koha 3.8.x series.

Koha 3.8.9 can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha Live CD Lite Released
by Vimal Kumar

An improved version of Koha Live CD Lite has been released, based on Koha 3.10.x and Lubuntu 12.04.1.

Koha Live CD Lite is suitable to run on computers with low processor speeds and RAM. Running in live mode, it is suitable for learning. It is also suitable for installation. Here are its features:

• Easy installation steps
• Koha installation based on Ubuntu packages, so easy to upgrade to new versions
• Koha customised for ready to use
• Zebra server enabled
• Customised MARC fields in cataloguing
• Scheduled database backup
• Build on Lubuntu 12.04.1 LTS
• Detailed Read Me file
• Sample reports

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders) (France) via BibLibre
• Lebanon Public Libraries (USA) via ByWater Solutions
• Perry-Lecompton Community Library (USA) via ByWater Solutions

Sonam Penjor, Manager of Educational Technology at the Royal University of Bhutan, reports that the University launched Koha in nine of its ten member colleges around Bhutan on 1 December 2012.

Koha Migration in Turkey
by Mustafa Arici

We are happy to announce to the Koha community the great Koha migration project going on in Turkey lately.

This project, initiated by the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Near East University, aims to migrate all the public libraries operating under the authority of the Ministry. This amounts to 1,112 branches, with more than 800,000 users total and approximately 8,000,000 bibliographic records currently. It is anticipated that this migration will attract the attention of other libraries around the country and also of some other organisations as well.

Near East University’s Innovation and IT Center is dealing with the technical aspects of the project. I would like to point out that Near East University Grand Library has used a modified version of Koha since 2005 and has made some software contributions to the Koha project from time to time.

Augustan Society Library on Koha
by Bruce A. Metcalf

The Augustan Society Library has been around for more than half a century, but we have not previously had a public catalog.

The reason is that our founding director had an eidetic memory, and a question to him might result in not just a book title, but it’s location, description, and usually a page number! Alas, with his passing, we have lost this valuable finding aid.

We are presently running Koha 3.6.2 under Debian Squeeze on a virtual server, and are in the slow process of cataloging our collection of about 20,000 volumes on the subjects of ancient and medieval history, heraldry, genealogy, chivalry, and royal biography.

With only a thousand volumes cataloged to date, the catalog is yet sparse, but with regular additions of perhaps 50 volumes per week. OPAC access is free and unrestricted, and ILL requests will be honored.

The catalog is online here. More information about our Society is here.

Community Gossip

Vimal Kumar V. and S. Jasimudeen have published an article entitled “Adoption and user perceptions of Koha library management system in India.”

Kyle Hall, Cindy Murdock Ames, and John Brice of the Crawford County Federated Library System have published an article entitled “Open Source Library Software Development in a Small Rural Library System.” (Kyle’s also on staff at ByWater Solutions).

Corey Fuimaono, a student at Aotea College participating in Catalyst IT’s Catalyst Academy, became the 200th developer to contribute to the Koha project. Corey’s been working on incorporating Bootstrap into Koha.

Marshall Breeding has posted the results of his Perceptions 2012: An International Survey of Library Automation, which includes responses from a number of Koha libraries.

Laurence Lefaucheur continues to post a French translation of each issue of the Koha community newsletter.

Nicole Engard, Koha Documentation Manager, has been nominated for the Opensource.com People’s Choice Award for her article “Should we require that open source is developed openly?”.

Support Provider News

OrisysIndia Consultancy Services of Trivandrum, India, has been added to the Koha community website’s list of paid support providers.

BibLibre has posted a two-part French-language presentation on Koha 3.10.

ByWater Solutions publishes an informative blog on Koha use and development. Recent posts include:

• A little bit about “Relevance” in Koha
• UNION or JOIN in my query???
• Coming Attractions: Koha Plugin System!
• Change in Library of Congress Z39.50 Target

Upcoming Koha Events

February General IRC Meeting

The February general IRC meeting will be held on 7 February 2013 at 2:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Marseille Hackfest
by Paul Poulain

BibLibre is organizing a hackfest in Marseille, 18-22 March 2013. There are already 30 people registered (18 BibLibre staff and 12 others).

It’s a great time to hack and have fun on Koha. There will be people from Norway, Germany, and USA. People from Italy, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Poland, Greece, and all other countries around the world, you’re welcome!

Just email me if you want more information or plan to come.

Past Koha Events

January General IRC Meeting

The January general IRC meeting was held on 9 January 2013.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Koha Community Newsletter
November 2012

Volume 3, Issue 11
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10 Released
  • Koha 3.8.7 Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Release Manager’s Newsletter
  • Koha 3.8.6 Live CD Lite released
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
  • “You Must Help Me Now!”
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • December General IRC Meeting
• Past Koha Events
  • November General IRC Meeting
  • Global Bug Squashing Weekend
  • Melbourne Koha Users Group Meeting
  • Oslo Get to Know Koha Day

Koha Development

Koha 3.10.0 Released
by Paul Poulain

The Koha team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.10.0.

This is a major release that comes with many new features. It includes 160 enhancements and 455 bugfixes.

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world. The website for the Koha project is http://koha-community.org.

Koha 3.10.0 can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.8.7 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha team is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.7.

This is a bugfix/maintenance release.

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world. The website for the Koha project is http://koha-community.org.

Koha 3.8.7 can be downloaded here.

Installation instructions are here or in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball.

Release notes are here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for
Koha 3.10.0, October 2012, and bug resolution statistics for January-October 2012.

Release Manager’s Newsletter

Paul Poulain, Koha 3.10 Release Manager, publishes a monthly newsletter dedicated to Koha development. It can be found on the Koha Community website in the Koha News category.

The latest issue is here.

Koha 3.8.6 Live CD Lite released

Vimal Kumar Vazhappally, Koha Community Live CD/DVD Manager, has released a live CD based on Koha 3.8.6. More info is here.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Banning Library District (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• INM Library at the Leibniz Institute for New Materials (Germany) (via BSZ)
• Samuel Merritt University (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Santa Fe Indian School (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Terry Reese, the developer of MarcEdit, has been working to integrate MarcEdit with Koha via Koha’s API. See his recent blog posts for more info.

Marshall Breeding is encouraging libraries to participate in the Perceptions 2012 International Library Automation Survey.

Chris Cormack reports: “I have started to make a wall of library cards of libraries using Koha. I only have 5 so far, but I would absolutely love it if people would send me a card from their library. I think it would make a fantastic display and I promise to take lots of photos of it (under a CC-BY-SA license). If you want to send one, please send it to Chris Cormack, Catalyst IT, PO Box 11053, Manners Street, Wellington 6142, New Zealand.”

Joanne Dillon is the new Digital Services Lead at Te Takere, the Horowhenua Culture & Community Centre in Levin, New Zealand. Joanne says, “I am a qualified librarian with 20+ years of experience working in mainly public libraries but also academic, corporate and special libraries. In my spare time I develop websites using the open source WordPress CMS and hope to teach myself app development. I have experience with Dynix, Horizon and most recently, Symphony in a library consortium. I’m looking forward to learning more about Koha and meeting fellow community members.”

Judy Russell is the new director of the Converse Free Library in Lyme, New Hampshire, which went live with Koha via Bywater Solutions in June 2012. Judy was previously Director of the Fairlee Public Library in Fairlee, Vermont, and an active member of VOKAL. She is, in fact, still a member of the Board of the Green Mountain Library Consortium, the organization that oversees VOKAL, the Bywater-supported ILS in Vermont. Judy’s a huge Koha fan and is looking forward to connecting with Koha users in New Hampshire. She’s working on creating a users’ listserv to share ideas, tips, and troubleshooting advice; if you’re a New Hampshire Koha user and would like to be a member of this listserv, please email her.

Paul Poulain has published the results of his testing of Plack in the 3.10 interface.

Support Provider News

BibLibre and Elidoc have announced a partnership to provide Greek libraries with support for Koha and other open source software.

“You Must Help Me Now!”
by Chris Cormack

This is perhaps going to sound a little whiny and maybe it is, but I’ll feel better for having written it. Working in a community of volunteers you soon discover a right way to ask for help and a wrong way. Normally I try to apply the one free pass rule, and of course in an international project like Koha there are bound to be issues with language differences. But lately there has been a disturbing trend in demanding help.

With a Free Software project, there are of course always areas to improve on, and no project should be offended at people pointing that out, or asking the same questions again and again. Where the problem occurs is in tone. People who work on Koha are either being paid to, in which case they are usually being paid to satisfy a client’s needs, or working as a volunteer, or most often as a combination of the two. So for them to spend time answering your question means time away from who is paying them, or from their family, or from some other part of their life. A lot of us do this willingly, but there are only 24(ish) hours in a day, so if you want your question to jump to the front, here are some handy tips:

• Ask specific questions, and provide as much information as you can. “I’m running Koha 3.8.3, installed from debian packages, on a 64-bit OS. The hard drive died yesterday, and after reboot, I can no longer search in Koha” is a a good question. “KOHA is broke, fix it” is not.
• Ask with a willingness to listen to the answers.
• Remember not everyone who answers is an expert, but they are giving up their time to try and help. Graciousness never ever hurts.

Here endeth the whine.

Upcoming Koha Events

December General IRC Meeting

The December general IRC meeting will be held on 5 December 2012 at 18:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Past Koha Events

November General IRC Meeting

The November general IRC meeting was held on 7 November 2012.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Global Bug Squashing Weekend
by Magnus Enger

Global bug squashing days are days designated to a concerted effort to get bugs and patches moving along in the right direction.

A Global bug squashing weekend was held Friday through Monday, 9-12 November 2012, and there was much rejoicing.

More info is here.

Melbourne Koha Users Group Meeting

The second Melbourne Koha Users Group meeting was held on 15 November. Emily Mcleay has posted a summary of the meeting.

Oslo Get to Know Koha Day
by Magnus Enger

The very first Norwegian “Get to know Koha” day was held in Oslo on 7 November. 19 people from 11 different libraries attended, representing public, county, and academic libraries. Magnus Enger and Katrin Fischer made presentations covering an introduction to free software, the Koha project, and usage of Koha internationally. The second half of the day was dedicated to trying out Koha in practice. Many questions were asked and answered, and it is the impression of the organizer that in general the system was viewed favourably. It looks like at least two of the libraries present at the workshop will be migrating to Koha, and perhaps there will be more when they have all considered their options a little longer.

Hey, it’s the beginning of november, and I published no RM newsletter at the beginning of october !!! So, for the price of one newsletter, you’ll get a double one !

Koha and Plack

The most important thing for the next release is probably the support for Plack on the staff interface. It was OK for the OPAC in Koha 3.8, in 3.10, I think it’s stable enough for staff interface as well. I wanted to investigate the user benefit for Plack, and have written a long email on BibLibre blog. You should read it !

Release process

String Freeze

As announced, we entered “string freeze” 2 weeks ago. It mean that no new features will be added into Koha 3.10, because nothing changing a string will be added. So, practically, no enhancement will be added.
Since the string freeze I’ve pushed many patches fixing bugs, some critical, many that are not.

Branching 3.10

At the end of last week, Jared (the 3.12 Release Manager) and me (the 3.10 Release Manager) agreed to “branch” Koha 3.10 on Koha git repository.
What does it mean ? git is the tool we use for tracking and managing changes in Koha source code. Each version of Koha is managed with a “branch” in git. There is a “master” branch, that is used for the future version of Koha, and a 3.8.x, 3.6.x, … branch that is used for the released versions.

When a change is made on the “master” branch, if it’s a bugfix, it’s also applied to each “maintainance” branch.

We’ve branched 3.10.x means there is now a 3.10.x branch, that is used for Koha 3.10. Jared started “playing” with “master”, I don’t push onto master anymore, just on 3.10.x It requires a good coordination between Jared and me, because I’m interested in seeing bugfixes pushed on master as quickly as possible. Once it’s done, I “merge” them onto 3.10.x branch, and they’ll be available for 3.10.0
The positive benefit of this is that Jared can already start pushing things that will be for 3.12 only. He also can start learning how to push, so, when 3.12 cycl start, he will be ready !

Important patches pushed in september and october

I’ve pushed 492 patches in two months. Some add important features in Koha and deserve a hilight:

Bug 7412: pre-filling items in cataloguing

Koha can now remember what was in the previous item filled, to be able to create multiple items quickly. By default, all subfields are prefilled when the PrefillItem syspref is on, unless you specify which fields you want to prefill in the SubfieldsToUseWhenPrefill syspref (With a value of “f u v”, only the $f, $u and $v will be prefilled, for example)

Bug 7621: Match age restriction of title with borrower’s age without using categories

Public libraries and school libraries often have to deal with a lot of age restrictions, e.g. with FSK (see www.fsk.de) or PEGI (Pan European Game Information, see www.pegi.info) and/or with regional rules regarding movies (virtually every canton in Switzerland has it’s own rules).

The functionality submitted with Bug 7621 provides an easy way to match age restriction on biblio records (e.g. on field 521a for MARC21) against the patron’s age.

Bug 5911: Transport Cost Matrix

Create transport_cost table, added UseTransportCostMatrix syspref.
transport_cost table contains branch to branch transfer costs. These are used for filling inter-branch hold transfers.

Bug 7986: Export issues for patron

In the circulation page, you can now export (as csv or iso2709) a list of items which are currently checked out by a borrower.

Bug 8757: longer descriptions for authorised values

Authorised values descriptions are now 200 chars long (instead of 80 before)

Bug 8597: Add mobile functionality to ccsr theme

The CCSR theme for the OPAC have been added to Koha.
This patch also adds some systempreferences:

• OpacMainUserBlockMobile – alternate content for the MainUserBlock for mobile
• OPACMobileUserCSS – custom CSS for mobile views only
• OpacShowFiltersPulldownMobile – whether or not to show the index dropdown on the mobile view
• OpacShowLibrariesPulldownMobile – whether or not to show the library dropdown on the mobile view

This patch adds mobile specific display for the OPAC. If you use this theme, your OPAC displayed on a mobile phone will be specific. Many things are automatically hidden, to be more readable on a small screen.

Bug 8211: Add exploded search options

When working with hierarchical subject headings, it is sometimes helpful to do a search for all records with a specific subject, plus broader/narrower/related subjects. This patch adds support for these “exploded” subject searches to Koha.

Bug 7993: Save reports with Group/Subgroup hierarchy

This should make saved reports more manageable by adding new fields to saved reports.
Group/Subgroup hierarchy is stored in authorised_values, categories REPORT_GROUP and REPORT_SUBGROUP, connected by REPORT_SUBGROUP.lib_opac -> REPORT_GROUP.authorised_value

Bug 7751: Decrease loans for items in demand for holds

This patch let the library choose to reduce the loan period given to items on renewal when they are in high demand for holds.
If the system preference decreaseLoanHighHolds is set, the check-out duration is lowered to decreaseLoanHighHoldsDuration if there is more than decreaseLoanHighHoldsValue holds placed on a given item.

Bug 5339: Invoices management improvement

This patch adds new features to acquisition module:

• invoices.pl: allow to search in invoices on several criteria
• invoice.pl: permit to view and modify invoice details. Invoices contains:
• shipment date
• billing date
• shipment cost and budget used for shipment cost

Bug 7401: Shelving Location facet

This patch enables the shelving location facet as an alternative to the branches fact in two situations:

• when SingleBranchMode is enabled
• when there is only one branch in the branches table

Bug 2060: Update command line MARC import scripts

Tools to import iso2709 files has been improved and can now import an authority file.

Bug 5335: More granular VAT

The available VATs is now a syspref containing a list of possible values (0.055|0.196 in france for example).
Each supplier will have a default vat value, but for each order line the librarian is now able to choose the VAT to apply.

Bug 7913: Receiving serials in a loop

Librarians can now generate the number of issues entered from a message box and apply ‘arrived’ status to all of them in one click.

Bug 8674: Adds script batchdeletebiblios

This (command-line) script deletes biblios which biblionumbers are in a file passed in parameter.
If one biblio has items, it is not deleted.

Internal and plumbing

Many patches have been pushed to quiet warnings, fix perlcritic errors, add documentation, fix translatability, improve Koha test suite, fix security vulnerabilities,…

QA tools

A few months ago, Mason James started to work on a Perl tools to check patches submitted to Koha against our coding guidelines. This tool has been improved by Jonathan Druart, and is now used by the QA team to detect QA errors that can be detected automatically. For example, with this tool we can detect that a patch introduces something that make XML or Perl code invalid, or a template not translatable anymore.

The tools is now available on git on our git server

Koha Community Newsletter
October 2012

Volume 3, Issue 10
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.8.6 Released
  • Koha 3.6.10 Released
  • Koha 3.10 String Freeze
  • Koha Statistics
  • Koha 3.12 Roles
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Past Koha Events
  • October General IRC Meeting
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • November General IRC Meeting
  • Melbourne Koha Users Group Meeting
  • Oslo Get to Know Koha Day

Koha Development

Koha 3.8.6 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.6.

This release contains security fixes for XSS vulnerabilities. Everyone running 3.8.x is encouraged to upgrade.

You can download the release here.

Packages will be available here soon.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.6.10 Released
by Jared Camins-Esakov

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.6.10.

This is a maintenance and security release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes, as well as fixing several serious security vulnerabilities. Everyone running an earlier version of Koha 3.6 is strongly encouraged to update to 3.6.10.

You can download the release here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.10 String Freeze

In preparation for the release of 3.10, Release Manager Paul Poulain has declared a string freeze.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for
Koha 3.6.9, Koha 3.6.10, Koha 3.8.5, and Koha 3.8.6.

Koha 3.12 Roles

The Koha community has elected the following people into roles for the 3.12 release:

• Release Manager: Jared Camins-Esakov (USA)
• Translations Manager: D Ruth Bavousett (USA)
• Documentation Manager: Nicole C. Engard (USA)
• Database Documentation Manager: Nicole C. Engard (USA)
• Installation Documentation Manager: Mason James (New Zealand)
• Quality Assurance Manager: Katrin Fischer (Germany)
• Quality Assurance Team: Marcel De Rooy (Netherlands), Jonathan Druart (France), Mason James (New Zealand), Paul Poulain (France), Elliott Davis (USA)
• Release Maintainer 3.8.x: Chris Cormack (New Zealand)
• Release Maintainer 3.10.x: Chris Cormack (New Zealand)
• Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat (New Zealand)
• Live CD/DVD Manager: Vimal Kumar Vazhappally (India)
• Bug Wranglers: Marc Véron (Switzerland), Chris Hall (New Zealand), Magnus Enger (Norway), Mirko Tietgen (Germany)

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Liberty Lake Municipal Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Little Elm Public Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Preston Library at the Virginia Military Institute (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Liz Rea has accepted a position with CatalystIT and will be moving with her husband Thatcher and son Soren to New Zealand. As a result, Northeast Kansas Library System is seeking to hire a systems administrator.

Henri-Damien Laurent will be leaving BibLibre at the end of the year.

Paul Poulain is exploring organizing a hackfest in Marseilles in 2013, perhaps in March.

Magnus Enger reports that the Hylte Public Library has become Sweden’s first public library to implement Koha.

Nicole Engard gave a presentation on open source trends and issues at the Internet Librarian 2012 conference.

Elliott Davis posted an overview of match points used in importing MARC records.

Elliott also posted an account of his effort to rewrite the Koha calendar.

Ryan Terrenal of the National Library of the Philippines reports: “We are still in the building stage of the Koha community in the Philippines. We have installed 297 computers with Koha 2.29 running on Fedora Linux. We are promoting it to anyone interested in using the Koha ILS. Our long term goal is to make Koha ILS the standard library system here in the Philippines. We are hoping that we can work together for this project. We also have Kultura Link running on Koha Version 3.41.”

Support Provider News

BibLibre has contributed a new module called opac to the open-source drupal project.

BibLibre has posted an overview of their efforts to rebase their development for inclusion in the community master.

ByWater Solutions is now offering Canadian-based Koha hosting services. More info is here.

Past Koha Events

October General IRC Meeting

The October general IRC meeting was held on 10 October 2012.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Upcoming Koha Events

November General IRC Meeting

The November general IRC meeting will be held on 7 November 2012 at 02:00 UTC.

The agenda and other information is here.

Melbourne Koha Users Group Meeting

Irma Birchall reports that the second Melbourne Koha Users Group Meeting will be held on Thursday, 15 November, 1730-1930, followed by dinner.

Oslo Get to Know Koha Day

Magnus Enger reports that Libriotech is doing a “Get to know Koha” day in Oslo on 7 November. There is room for 20 attendees, and so far both small and large academic as well as public libraries have signed up. The programme is here.

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 3, Issue 9: September 2012

Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.8.5 Released
  • Koha 3.6.9 Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Release Manager’s Newsletter
  • Search Re-write Underway
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
• Past Koha Events
  • September General IRC Meeting
  • Global Bug Squashing Day
  • First German Koha Workshop
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • October General IRC Meeting

Koha Development

Koha 3.8.5 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.5.

This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.

You can download the release here.

Packages will be available here soon.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.6.9 Released
by Jared Camins-Esakov

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.6.9.

This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.

You can download the release here.

Release notes are here.

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted signoff statistics for August.

Release Manager’s Newsletter

Paul Poulain, Koha 3.8 & 3.10 Release Manager, publishes a monthly newsletter dedicated to Koha development. It can be found on the Koha Community website in the Koha News category.

The latest issue is here.

Search Re-write Underway
by Jared Camins-Esakov

The first few steps of the search rewrite have been funded (up to 1(b).iii. on the RFC), so I will shortly be starting work on integrating the new QueryParser. This initial part of the development will not be disruptive, but will fix a number of corner cases, such as “magic” punctuation breaking searches, and giving librarians the option of writing sophisticated boolean searches that actually work the way they are supposed to.

I will of course be keeping all my code in a public repository so that anyone who is interested can take a look as the work progresses. I would request that anyone with examples of problematic searches (or searches they would like to be able to do) tell me about them, so we can use those searches as tests in the course of development.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Grand County Public Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• North Central Michigan College (USA) (Equinox Software)
• Sherwood School (New Zealand) (via Anact Open Source Solutions)
• Trillium Lakelands District School Board (Canada) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21 (Argentina) (via Tomás Cohen Arazi)
• Urban School of San Francisco’s Herbst Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Ruth Bavousett has posted her thoughts on open source and the prevention of vendor lock-in.

Gaetan Boisson reports that Rennes 2 University did an amazing job on their opac.

Kyle Hall has posted a method of using jQuery to add to the bottom of a checkout slip the total value of the items a patron is checking out.

Nicole Engard has posted over 100 Koha tutorial videos over the last few years. She just added tags to all of them to make them easier to find.

Jared Camins-Esakov reports there’s a fun new source of enhanced content for the OPAC. iDreamBooks has a “Readometer” which gives a numeric rating based on reviews from critics, and it can now be embedded in the OPAC using this jQuery code. There are a limited number of books right now, but Jared has spoken to the folks at iDreamBooks and says they plan to gradually fill in their archives.

Past Koha Events

September General IRC Meeting

The September general IRC meeting was held on 5 September 2012.

More information, including the agenda and links to the minutes, is here.

Global Bug Squashing Day
by Magnus Enger

Global bug squashing days are days designated to a concerted effort to get bugs and patches moving along in the right direction.

A Global bug squashing day was held on Friday, 14 September 2012, and there was much rejoicing.

More info is here.

First German Koha Workshop
by Katrin Fischer

From 28 to 29 August 2012 the first German Koha workshop was held at the Württemberg State Library (WLB) in Stuttgart. About 23 people attended, ranging from librarians to developers, and composed mostly of people interested in learning more about Koha, along with some currently migrating to it. Wolfgang Heymans and Katrin Fischer from BSZ and Robin Sheat from Catalyst IT presented talks covering workflows to customisations, installation to reporting.

The slides of the presentations are available online. The feedback from the participants was positive and we hope that people got a good impression of the potential of Koha and its community.

Upcoming Koha Events

October General IRC Meeting

The October general IRC meeting will be held on 10 October 2012 at 10:00 UTC.

More information, including the agenda, is available here.

Official Koha Newsletter (ISSN 2153-8328)
Volume 3, Issue 8: August 2012

Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.8.4 Released
  • Koha 3.6.8 Released
  • Koha 3.10 Release Delayed
  • Koha Statistics
  • Release Manager’s Newsletter
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
• Past Koha Events
  • August General IRC Meeting
  • Global Bug Squashing Day
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • September General IRC Meeting
  • PASIFIKA Koha workshop
  • Help Make KohaCon13 a Success!

Koha Development

Koha 3.8.4 Released
by Chris Cormack

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.8.4.

This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.

You can download the release here.

Debian packages will be available here soon.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.6.8 Released
by Jared Camins-Esakov

The Koha release team are proud to announce the release of Koha 3.6.8.

This is a maintenance release and contains a lot of useful bug fixes.

You can download the release here.

Release notes are here.

Koha 3.10 Release Delayed
by Paul Poulain

The official release of Koha 3.10.0 is delayed by one month. For Koha 3.4 and Koha 3.8, we faced some nasty bugs that were not detected before the release. We think the “feature freeze” was too short to identify all potential problems.

That’s why I have the following plan that delays the release by one month:

1. until 22 Sep: development
2. 22 Sep: feature freeze, no more large or core enhancements pushed for 3.10, whatever the patch submission date
3. 22 Oct: string freeze, no more string changes
4. 22 Nov: Koha 3.10.0 is released

If you plan to upgrade your version immediately when the new one is released, please note that the release will be made on 22 November.

I could release a 3.10.0RC1 (“Release Candidate”) on 22 October for early adopters. If you’re interested in such a RC1, let me know!

Koha Statistics

Chris Cormack, Koha Community statistics wizard, has posted statistics for Koha 3.8.4 and Koha 3.6.8, and signoff statistics for July.

Chris also addressed on his blog how long it takes patches and enhancements to make it into master.

Release Manager’s Newsletter

Paul Poulain, Koha 3.8 & 3.10 Release Manager, publishes a monthly newsletter dedicated to Koha development. It can be found on the Koha Community website in the Koha News category.

The latest issue is here.

Koha Community

New Koha Libraries

• Clatsop Community College (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Indiana Supreme Court Law Library (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• French Cultural Center of Boston (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Kenya Polytechnic University College Library (Kenya)
• LCC International University Library (Lithuania) (via ByWater Solutions)
• Palco and Lucas Public Libraries (USA) (via ByWater Solutions)

Community Gossip

Nancy Keener reports that the Systems staff at Washoe County Library System will be presenting a program on “Migrating to Koha” at the Nevada Library Association conference in Las Vegas this October. They will also be doing a program on “Do-it Yourself”, Self-Service Kiosks, and using Linux in the library. Nancy, whose library is hosting KohaCon13, also says, “This same Nevada Library Association conference will be held in Reno next October at the same time and place as KohaCon13. It is our hope to get a better deal on rooms and meeting space by having the two separate conferences in the same location. It also will show Nevada libraries that the Koha community is a vibrant and innovative group.”

Catalyst Academy students continue to contribute patches to Koha. Koha 3.8.0 had 15 patches from Academy students.

Irma Birchall reports that a mailing list for Australian Koha users has been established.

Rutgers MLS students will be using Koha in their “Library Systems and Software” class this fall. Hosting is being donated by ByWater Solutions.

The National Library of the Philippines and its use of Koha was featured in an article in the online Sun Star newspaper.

Jesse Maseto posted a description of the stages a Koha bug moves through on the way to being fixed.

Koha Kenya is an association of information managers, librarians and IT specialists fostering the diffusion of open source technology in libraries and Information Centers across Kenya. More info is here.

Kathryn Tyree of Catalyst IT went from not having a git checkout of Koha to having her first patch pass QA in less than 90 minutes.

Past Koha Events

August General IRC Meeting

The August general IRC meeting was held on 8 August 2012.

More information, including the agenda and links to the minutes, is here.

Global Bug Squashing Day
by Magnus Enger

Global bug squashing days are days designated to a concerted effort to get bugs and patches moving along in the right direction.

A Global bug squashing day was held on Friday, 10 August 2012, and there was much rejoicing.

More info is here.

Upcoming Koha Events

September General IRC Meeting

The September general IRC meeting will be held on 5 September 2012 at 18:00 UTC.

More information, including the agenda, will be available here.

PASIFIKA Koha workshop

Pacific libraries using or considering using Koha are invited to a free one-day PASIFIKA Koha workshop on Monday 10 September 2012 at the University of the South Pacific Laucala campus based in Suva, Fiji Islands.

More info is here.

Help Make KohaCon13 a Success!

KohaCon13 will be held Reno, Nevada, USA, at a date to be determined. There will be three days of conference, one day of an activity, and three days of hackfest.

Main and summary wiki pages have been created.

Community members are encouraged to volunteer to help organize the conference. A volunteer IRC meeting has already been held.

Release Plan

I have a very important announcement about the release: The official release of Koha 3.10.0 is delayed by one month. For Koha 3.4 and Koha 3.8, we faced some nasty bugs that were not detected before the release. We think the “feature freeze” was too short to identify all potential problems.
That’s why I have the following plan, that delay the release by one month:

• now->sept 22th => development process
• sept 22th => feature freeze, no more large or core enhancements pushed for 3.10, whatever the date of submission of the patch.
• oct 22th => string freeze, no more string changes
• nov 22th => Koha 3.10.0 is released

If you plan to upgrade your version immediately when the new one released, please note that the release will be made on Nov, 22th.
I could, if some of you request it, release a 3.10.0RC1 (“Release Candidate”) on Oct 22th, for early adopters. If you’re interested in such a RC1, let me know !

Bugzilla status

During last month, 70 bugs had one or more patches pushed in “master” branch, that will become Koha 3.10 in a few month.
There are (too) many patches signed off and waiting for QA: 44 when I write this newsletter.
The queue of patches needing to be tested and signed-off is large too: 111. Around 1/3rd of them are bugfixes, all other are enhancements.

Important patches pushed

solr 1st step(bug 8233)

The first step of the work to integrate solr as a search engine has been pushed. If you look in system preferences, you’ll see that there is a “SearchEngine” new syspref. It is set to “zebra” by default, which means nothing is changed in Koha behaviour. But if you swith the syspref to solr, you’ll activate solr.
Be carefull = this is highly experimental, and should not be used in production !
If you want more information, you can head to the wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/SearchEngine_Layer_RFC
There are a lot of things to do to fully integrate solr into Koha. That won’t be ready for 3.10, but, hopefully, it will be OK for 3.12.

rebuild_zebra_sliced.sh (bug 7286)

This script is in misc/migration_tools, and is very handy to index a large catalogue that has some biblios having a problem. It slices the database in smaller chunks and try to index each chunk separately.

checkNonIndexedBiblios.pl (bug 6566)

This script will check if each biblio can be found by zebra (by searching the biblionumber). If a given biblio can’t be found, a flag let you request, if you want, a re-indexation.
This script can be setup as a cron job, as it has some parameters to make it almost silent, just reporting everything went well if there is no “disappeared” records.

Additional information for support in About page (bug 8301)

Marc Véron submitted a patch for a very nice enhancement: the “About” page now has a tab showing irrelevant or inconsistencies in the setup of your Koha. It’s just a first step for now, many checks can be added, but that’s a very good idea !

Replacing YUI jquery (bugs 8283 and 8281)

We continue replacing YUI by jquery. The bug 8283 removes the following files:

• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie-debug.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie-min.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie.js

The bug 8281 removes files in the following directories:

• /prog/en/lib/yui/yuitest/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yuiloader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yahoo/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yahoo/yahoo-debug.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/uploader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/treeview/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/tabview/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swfstore/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swfdetect/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swf/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/stylesheet/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/storage/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/slider/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/selector/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/resize/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/reset/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/progressbar/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/profilerviewer/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/profiler/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/paginator/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/logger/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/layout/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/imageloader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/imagecropper/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/history/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/grids/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/get/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/fonts/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-simulate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-mouseenter/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-delegate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/element-delegate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/editor/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/dom/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/datemath/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/datatable/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/connection/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/colorpicker/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/charts/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/carousel/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/calendar/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/base/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/assets/

If you find something wrong and see that there is still a reference to one of those files, add a comment to bug 8283 !

Max fines in circulation matrix (bug 7420)

The max fines was a system preference. Now we still have the system preference, for total fine maximum, and can also define the max fine for each late document at issuing-rules level (branch/patron category/item type)

New dependencies

The following dependencies have been added:

• HTML::FormatText
• Text::Unaccent

Many dependencies are added by solr: Data::Paginator, Data::Pagination, JSON::Any, MooseX::Storage, MooseX::Types, String::RewritePrefix, Time::Progress, Test::MockModule. They are not needed if you don’t use solr, thus they are not marked as required, but if you plan to play with solr, you’ll need them.

KOCT translatable

The Koha Offline Circulation Tool, a firefox plugin, is now translatable. I pushed a patch that add this feature and the translation to french. Some volunteers sent me translations to spanish, german, galician and italian.

It’s very easy to add a translation, just head here :

http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=contrib/global.git;a=tree;f=koct/chrome/locale;hb=72ba809c45caca19d8dc4e438aef55eb56ca9fb4

(in koct/chrome/locale directory if you clone the git repo)

cp -r en-US yourlocale-language
cd yourlocale-language

translate the 2 tiny files koct.dtd and koct.properties

git add yourlocal-language
git commit
git format-patch

send me the patch, I’ll push it.