What I Learned Today…

The final session at KohaCon yesterday was a video of Koha development over 10 years. I didn’t write it up because there’s not much to say, but now that the video is up online I can share that with you all and you can see what I saw. Technorati Tags: kohacon10

David Friggens put together an awesome Prezi map of the presentations at Koha – make sure you check it out later when he’s updated it with the final links and such. Kohacon10 on Prezi Technorati Tags: kohacon10

George Oates from the Open Library project was up next to tell us how we can use Koha with the Open Library. The Open Library started with records from something like 30 libraries and now anyone can add books by filling in just a few required fields (but I highly recommend adding more than that first form asks for – just so that the library has more valuable info). I  [ Read More ]

Donald Christie from Catalyst was up first after lunch to talk to us about celebrating, promoting and supporting free software in libraries. First up – Freedom. With free software we have the freedom to have new ideas, learn, share, remove arbitrary controls, collaborate, form communities and spread knowledge. Donald also brought up the anti-features that François mentioned and pointed us to a site where you can find a list of  [ Read More ]

Farasat Shafi-Ullah from SCME National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad, Pakistan was the first up this morning and we all gave him a huge round of applause for taking a 5 day journey to get here! I have to add yet again that this conference is an awesome way to see how much we all love Koha and how strong the community really is. Now on to  [ Read More ]

Amzari Abu Bakar came up after me to talk about the Koha experience in Malaysia. Amzari started by telling us about the systems that libraries in Malaysia are using – they run the gambit from home grown to large proprietary systems. From 2005 to 2008 only three libraries (one special, one school and one small academic) in Malaysia were known to be using Koha (as said earlier there is no  [ Read More ]

I obviously couldn’t blog myself so Ian Walls wrote up my session on the ByWater Solutions blog and I’m going to share it with you here (with his permission). —————- A presentation by our very own Nicole Engard. As Nicole was writing her last book, Practical Open Source Software for Libraries, she did a word cloud on the first few chapters. After “open”, “source” and “software”, the next largest word  [ Read More ]

Irma Birchall and Sue Lavery are up next to talk about Koha when it’s not the code that’s locked up (because the library is in a prison). The prison in question was built to focus on both incarceration and rehabilitation – so that the prisons can go back to normal life when released. Why Koha in the prison library? Because a modern ILS is essential. The librarian needs something simple  [ Read More ]

Paul Poulain from BibLibre was first after lunch to give us the history of Koha. He started with a recap of what we heard from Rosalie on the first day – Koha was developed to meet the needs of of HLT, and only HLT. Koha is full of firsts: it used agile development before there was any real definition of ‘agile development’ it was the first fully web based system  [ Read More ]

François Marier was up next to tell us how to convince our bosses (well library bosses) that sharing is good! Before talking about software freedom, let’s take a look at non-free software. François started with an example from Amazon in July 2009. Amazon realized that they had some books in their Kindle library that they didn’t have the rights to sell. They removed those books from the catalog, but people  [ Read More ]