The thought was fleeting but powerful, “you could get off plane right now before they close the doors…”. I’ve never liked enclosed spaces and an airplane, no matter how big, is very enclosed. What made it worse was I had to do it all again if I wanted to get home from Vanuatu. So, head [...]

Feel like you’re fighting your library system when it should be supporting you? Recent postings on the school library mailing list describe the frustration and exasperation felt by some school librarians trying to get their library system ‘online’. Getting your library online is easier with some systems than others. If you are trying to allow [...]

Anything that helps dispel the myth that the library system is there to issue and return books and not much else is worth a second look. The ability to play media, audio and video, right in the opac sounded enticing to me. Koha includes this function; using HTML5 it is now possible to have a [...]

Takapau School, with a roll of 130, is larger than most New Zealand rural primary schools. It services a mostly rural area, with the township of Takapau, Central Hawke’s Bay at its centre. The school library is located centrally in the Literacy Centre along with the computer suite and a number of specialist literacy and [...]

I was enjoying a little inner glow following the go-live of Koha at Tikokino School when news of another Koha migration, in Turkey, came through the mailing lists. There is a bit of a difference in scale between the two projects though; Tikokino School has 45 patrons, Turkey has over 800 000; Tikokino School has [...]

Unless you are part of that rare and unusual breed know as catalogers, you may have missed that a minor revolution is about to occur in your library, the introduction of RDA, Resource Description and Access. Whilst I am not a cataloger, I have had to get my head around RDA from a support perspective. [...]

Although Koha can be adapted as a content management system that is not its primary role. The good folks at BibLibre have been beavering away developing an OPAC module for Drupal. From the Drupal website drupal.org;  “Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported [...]

Given that it costs no more to produce one eBook than to produce one million I am a little disappointed that they are not cheaper. They do not have the printing, storage, handling and shipping costs of physical books so should be way cheaper, they very often are not. I would suggest it is because [...]

This afternoon I added over 40000 new books to my library, not bad for an hours work, and it didn’t cost me a cent. Project Gutenberg is an initiative that offers free e-books in a variety of formats. Luckily, the project also offer MARC records to download, which makes adding the books to Koha very [...]

Whilst investigating the process for schools to extract data from their existing library systems in order to migrate to Koha I have been surprised at the attitude of most vendors. All vendors of the propriety systems I have dealt with so far either charge many hundreds of dollars to extract records or make it difficult [...]