It all began in June last year with an email from Pauline enquiring about using Koha as the ILS for a school in Vanuatu. Pauline and her husband Gary, both retired teachers, had a project to relocate the library of a closed school in the Marlborough Sounds to the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. I was intrigued from the outset.
I never imagined then that I would be working with a group of librarians in beautiful Port Vila. Now I’m trying to sort out how I can get back there.

Gary had done a stint with VSA (Volunteer Services Abroad) teaching on Tanna some years ago and wanted to continue to help. Vanuatu has that effect on you. You know that your help is needed, wanted and appreciated.

I migrated the (now closed) Koromiko School library from MUSAC library manager to Koha and donated the server to their project. They packed the books, server and furniture and sent it to TAFEA College by sea. A few weeks later Pauline and Gary arrived to unpack the library and begin the task of cataloguing the remaining books and the French collection. It is testament to how easy Koha is to use that Pauline was able to work her way through almost all areas of Koha with the briefest of telephone advice. Pauline and Gary had the joy of seeing students reading and playing games any opportunity they had.

I enquired on the Koha mailing list for advice on a ‘foolproof’ backup system for the school in Vanuatu and this was seen by Rachel the librarian at the Vanuatu Institute for Teacher Education in Port Vila. I passed on her contact details to Pauline and Gary and they met her on their next trip and that contact eventually led to me running a two day Koha workshop at the Institute. It was attended by librarians from local schools, institute of technology, Tafea College and technicians from VITE.
Koha is well matched to the needs of Vanuatu; it is free to use, easy to use, doesn’t require constant maintenance, has modest hardware requirements and supports many languages.
I have the feeling that that chance contact with Pauline and Gary has started a long-term relationship with the wonderful people of Vanuatu.

Workshop at Simeliu library, VITE

Workshop attendees

Pauline, Gary and me

View from Vanuatu Institute of Teacher Education

http://youtu.be/a8fHgx9mE5U

A practical example of how open source software differs from proprietary software presented itself recently on the school library listserv around how book series are displayed in the catalogue.

The librarian thought, “Wouldn’t it be good if the OPAC could show the next book in a series”, a feature that was not available with their library system. Now, if you are using a proprietary system, your only course of actions is to contact the software vendor and ask for a new feature to be included. You are at the mercy of the software owner, they will decide what features are added and when. If they decide a feature is not to be added, there are no other alternatives.

With open source software it’s different; since you have access to the source code you are able to change the software yourself or engage someone else to do it for you. Even better, with open source software, you can share your new features with other users so that everyone benefits from your work.

If you are trying to allow access to a proprietary system running within the school, the obstacles are greater than a web based system. Firewall rules, opening ports and allowing outside access to an internal server can give some system admins nightmares.

This is where a web based library system wins hands down. Koha uses plain old port 80, making access straightforward.
Koha is not just web hosted, it is based on web technologies so is ready to deal with challenges still to come.

If it’s a flexible, online system you want, Koha is the answer.

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 further ‘tab’ at the item detail screen labeled ‘Play Media’. Selecting this tab presents the user with a built in media player.

OK, nice feature but what use is it?
Well, imagine for a moment…
Search for atoms and get an animation of atomic motion right in the opac. Not bad.
Search for Kokako and hear a bird. Nice.
Search for Hairy Maclary and hear the book read aloud. Great.

All from within the library opac.
The Koha OPAC is more like a public library portal than an ‘online public access catalogue’.

As with all enhancements in Koha, someone has worked on a feature, coded a solution, tested, recoded and finally released the result for the community to benefit. Often for no financial reward, sometimes sponsored by a support provider.
With Koha, because it is those who use the software who develop it, you tend to get features that users want rather than what the marketing department think will be most effective at undermining the competition.

Thank you to Mirko Tietgen (and those who tested, QA’d and assisted allow the way) for this feature.

Now, this little piece of html magic relies entirely on HTML5 support in *your* browser.  I use Firefox v21.0 and it works perfectly. If it doesn’t work in your browser, get a better one.

See for yourself… go to demo.koha.kiwi.nz and search ‘freedom fry’ for video or ‘kokako’ for audio.

Screenshot showing media playing in the opac

The school library is located centrally in the Literacy Centre along with the computer suite and a number of specialist literacy and learning support staff. This is a purpose built, modern building opened in 2002.

The library is light, bright and airy. A ‘reading nook’ scattered with cushions is a favorite spot with students especially when the sun streams in through the windows in winter.

Staff really appreciate the speed that Koha’s Z39.50 rapid cataloguing has brought to the workflow.

Often, it is the small things that make the largest difference. To get an overdue report takes one click with Koha, the old system took many more.

The next step is to make use of Koha’s comprehensive MARC compliance to upgrade the existing bibliographic records so that resources are even more discoverable in an online environment.

Takapau School Library

Sunny window area

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 just over 2000 items, Turkey has over 8 million.

It would be easy to feel over shadowed by this term of events, but rather than feeling dwarfed by such a large project, I am very pleased that little Tikokino School is able to benefit from the same features that attract much larger users.

Almost half of all New Zealand primary schools have less than 100 students; my own children went to a school with a roll that peaked at 65 and is now much smaller. I have always believed that being a rural or a small school should not mean accepting ‘second best’.
Koha is a world class library management system that allows schools, even small ones, to benefit from features that other systems call ‘add ons’ or ‘extra modules’.

I hope the folk in Turkey get to savour a little inner glow when their project goes live. Best of luck to them.

The Library of Congress, Australian National Library and National Library of NZ will all adopt RDA in the first half of 2013. RDA is the next stage in the evolution of library cataloging in the western world. Although the actual changes bought about by RDA are relatively easy to implement in a library management system, the conceptual changes that form the foundation of RDA are a little more ethereal.

Rather than cataloging the item at hand and creating a separate record for each and every item, RDA sees a single work and a number of versions or instances of that work. For example, instead of a separate record for each different form of the work ‘Hamlet’ which requires a patron to scroll through many search results to find the audio book version they were looking for, a catalog that is RDA’d should return a single result with the option to then see different versions (audio, print, movie, ebook, online article etc) of the work. RDA is supposed to be more user focused.

Although AACR2 still forms the foundation, RDA should be more ‘user friendly’. Latin abbreviations are no longer used, publication details are used as they appear on the work rather than being abbreviated are examples of how records will change.
RDA is aimed at an internet connected world where many of a library’s items exist only in cyber space. Where do you stick the barcode?

There are no major changes needed in the OPAC but hopefully patrons will notice that a greater depth of information can be gleaned from search results.

Of course Koha is ‘RDA ready’. What about you?

http://www.loc.gov/aba/rda/

http://www.rdatoolkit.org/

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 by an active and diverse community of people around the world.”

The OPAC module aims to allow a Drupal page to effectively become an OPAC+. Again from the Drupal website; “The opac module enables libraries to integrate their catalog into Drupal allowing importing records, make advanced searches with faceted results, circulation task etc … This module is intended to work with any ILS by using connectors. Everyone can make its own by creating a php file.”

This is a example of one of the benefits of Free and Open Source Software, users are able to adapt components to suit their needs, and share the results.

I am not a Drupal user but have been enthused enough to ‘dip my toe’ in the Drupal water.

Reading an eBook is also a barrier to widespread use. There is a reason many people print stuff to read… reading from a computer screen quickly becomes tiring. Reading from a phone is dreadful and a tablet/iThingy, not much better, though it does build the arm muscles.

The only e reader I enjoy using is the Sony, its ’10 000 page turn’ battery life is great.. but it isn’t backlit of course. Not a great negative but you do need a ‘book light’ to read in bed. The devices that are backlit have short (less than a day and often not much more than a lunch break) battery lives. Having to be constantly tethered to a power source isn’t ideal.

Getting content onto an eReader is also less than easy in many instances requiring a number of programs in order to work, and DRM of course.

There is a lot of hype around eBooks at the moment, perhaps more than they deserve.

There are some real benefits to eBooks though. The ability to have the equivalent of 20 kgs of paperbacks in a small device is tantalising. Probably more than I’ve read in my lifetime, a weeks reading for my wife though. Great for travelling.

It will be interesting to see where things are in five years time.

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 easy. By supplying the MARC records, I can have the records entered and searchable in no time.

The MARC records require a couple of fields to be added, achieved easily with MarcEdit, and then Koha can add items to the records. The results in the OPAC provide a link to the Project Gutenberg website where the ebooks can be downloaded in a a variety of formats or viewed online.

OK, they are not the latest bestsellers but there are some gems among them and many hard to find books too. I had always wanted to read about the Eureka Stockade, now’s my chance.