Koha Community Blogs

Koha Users Around the World

anonymous@125.168.34.33 — 2008-07-24T19:31:48+01:00

Please sign yourselves up. If it looks like a geographic area needs to be sub-divided, please do. You’re welcome to either include your library name, Koha version, and contact name or to create a wiki page to describe yourself. Koha Users Aro...

en:development:code_review_ideas - created

anonymous@65.26.82.45 — 2008-07-24T11:19:35+01:00

Sometimes it helps to have someone else look at code you have written. If you are asked to review someone’s patch, please put some effort into it. This checklist is a starting point to help you think of some things to look out for. It is not a...

Koha Wiki - renaming page

anonymous@65.26.82.45 — 2008-07-24T11:18:27+01:00

...

Item Status auto change

anonymous@62.212.120.129 — 2008-07-24T09:14:50+01:00

In Koha 3.0, the item status is set without duration. We will add a feature to explain how long a given status will be used, and which status must be set after that. That will be usefull, for example, to have a book with status “new book&rdqu...

Item status bulk change - Item bulk status change feature

anonymous@213.41.255.216 — 2008-07-24T06:16:01+01:00

We will add a page to bulk change the status or location of an item. The page will let you : choose the kind of info to change the value to set Then, the librarian with scan barcodes and all scanned items will have the data updated. ...

RFCs for Koha 3.2

anonymous@213.41.255.216 — 2008-07-24T06:10:47+01:00

This page contains RFCs for version 3.2 of Koha. All RFCs for major new features for Koha 3.2 should be posted to koha-devel and copied here. Architecture or multiple modules System groups Online help : it is outdated in 3.0. In 3.2, we should c...

Strumenti per la traduzione di Koha 3.0

anonymous@84.221.198.142 — 2008-07-24T01:25:33+01:00

Questa pagina è una raccolta di strumenti per la traduzione di Koha 3.0 in italiano. Per chi desiderasse collaborare è bene che si segnali sulla lista koha-translate http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-translate Glossario I termini sono ...

Open Source Books Sale at Bookpool

Nicole C. Engard — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:48:43 +0000

First, if you haven’t visited Bookpool - you should! They have some awesome prices on techie books. Second, now is the best time to visit because open source books from OSCON are on sale.

Patron reading record management - adding syspref as suggested by galen

anonymous@213.41.255.216 — 2008-07-23T06:11:12+01:00

Add a feature to let the patron manage it’s reading record himself. The laws in some countries requires that the library cleans the reading record after some time. This new feature will let the user himself decide what to do with the reading r...

Глосарій, словник термінів для перекладу Коха на українську

anonymous@217.196.160.253 — 2008-07-23T01:07:17+01:00

Глосарій, словник термінів для перекладу Коха на українську Примітки: якщо наводяться декілька варіантів, то біля найбільш влучного ставте плюсик враховуйте, що певне слово може вживатися декілька раз у різному контексті, отож варіант перекладу ...

First crack at a Koha3 .deb

chris — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:29:32 +0000

Well ive managed to build a package, with the correct dependencies, its set up to do a standard install, using the default values.

chris@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install cpan-libkoha-perl Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: cpan-libalgorithm-checkdigits-perl cpan-libansicolor-perl cpan-libbiblio-endnotestyle-perl cpan-libcgi-perl cpan-libclass-adapter-perl cpan-libconstant-perl cpan-libdata-dumper-perl cpan-libdigest-md5-perl cpan-libexporter-perl cpan-libgetopt-long-perl cpan-libhtml-template-pro-perl cpan-liblocale-codes-perl cpan-libmime-base64-perl cpan-libmodule-pluggable-perl cpan-libparams-util-perl cpan-libperl-ldap-perl cpan-libpod-parser-perl cpan-libscalar-list-utils-perl cpan-libsms-send-perl cpan-libtest-manifest-perl cpan-libtest-simple-perl cpan-libtext-csv-perl cpan-libtext-csv-xs-perl cpan-libtext-tabs-wrap-perl cpan-libtime-hires-perl cpan-libunicode-normalize-perl cpan-libxml-libxml-perl cpan-libxml-rss-perl libbarcode-code128-perl libclass-returnvalue-perl libdata-ical-perl libdigest-perl libgd-barcode-perl libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libnet-z3950-zoom-perl libpdf-reuse-barcode-perl libpdf-reuse-perl libschedule-at-perl libtext-vfile-asdata-perl The following NEW packages will be installed: cpan-libalgorithm-checkdigits-perl cpan-libansicolor-perl cpan-libbiblio-endnotestyle-perl cpan-libcgi-perl cpan-libclass-adapter-perl cpan-libconstant-perl cpan-libdata-dumper-perl cpan-libdigest-md5-perl cpan-libexporter-perl cpan-libgetopt-long-perl cpan-libhtml-template-pro-perl cpan-libkoha-perl cpan-liblocale-codes-perl cpan-libmime-base64-perl cpan-libmodule-pluggable-perl cpan-libparams-util-perl cpan-libperl-ldap-perl cpan-libpod-parser-perl cpan-libscalar-list-utils-perl cpan-libsms-send-perl cpan-libtest-manifest-perl cpan-libtest-simple-perl cpan-libtext-csv-perl cpan-libtext-csv-xs-perl cpan-libtext-tabs-wrap-perl cpan-libtime-hires-perl cpan-libunicode-normalize-perl cpan-libxml-libxml-perl cpan-libxml-rss-perl libbarcode-code128-perl libclass-returnvalue-perl libdata-ical-perl libdigest-perl libgd-barcode-perl libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libnet-z3950-zoom-perl libpdf-reuse-barcode-perl libpdf-reuse-perl libschedule-at-perl libtext-vfile-asdata-perl 0 upgraded, 41 newly installed, 0 to remove and 46 not upgraded. Need to get 3156kB of archives. After this operation, 24.9MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Setting up libpdf-reuse-barcode-perl (0.05-1) ... Setting up cpan-libperl-ldap-perl (0.36-1) ... Setting up libschedule-at-perl (1.06-1) ... Setting up cpan-libmodule-pluggable-perl (3.8-1) ... Setting up cpan-libparams-util-perl (0.33-1) ... Setting up cpan-libsms-send-perl (0.05-1) ... Setting up cpan-libtext-csv-perl (1.06-1) ... Setting up cpan-libtext-csv-xs-perl (0.52-1) ... Setting up cpan-libtext-tabs-wrap-perl (2006.1117-1) ... Setting up cpan-libtime-hires-perl (1.9715-1) ... Setting up cpan-libunicode-normalize-perl (1.02-1) ... Setting up cpan-libxml-libxml-perl (1.66-1) ... Setting up cpan-libtest-manifest-perl (1.22-1) ... Setting up cpan-libxml-rss-perl (1.33-1) ... Setting up cpan-libdigest-md5-perl (2.36-1) ... Setting up cpan-libkoha-perl (3.00.00-stableRC1-1) ...

chris@ubuntu:~$ ls /usr/share/koha/ bin doc intranet lib man misc opac

Next phase is to get it using debconf to allow the user to set the values themselves.

LugRadio Live Event Review, Part Web2.0

MJ Ray — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:18:59 +0000

LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0)

One aspect I didn’t mention in the LugRadio Live Event Review was how old-fashioned it seemed in some ways.

I guess I’ve got used to seeing conferences experimenting with various web2.0 toys like live-blogging, feedback walls and so on, or the excellent live video streaming of DebConfs, but it was a bit of a surprise to find myself the only person in the audience who connected to the IRC channel from the event.

One possible reason for that was that the wireless network was a bit difficult, or at least that was what I was told. I felt quite smug with my 3G smartphone IRC client (which I’ll blog about later) until Rufus Pollock mentioned the 800+ patents involved in 3G. Damn - I guess I hate freedom.

In one way, I guess it’s appropriate if the network wasn’t up to the task. Broken networks were a regular feature of early ALUG meetings, as the end of this email hints.

Web2.0 was there a little bit. There was a facebook page (which I accidentally spammed while travelling to the event), flickr:lugradiolive and ~~a twitter link of #lugradiolive - but how does that work? There’s no user called lugradiolive and you can’t have usernames containing #~~ Update: twitter:#lugradiolive (thanks to Dave Briggs for the explanation in a comment).

Anyway, seeing as there will be another LUG Radio Live, maybe we can arrange something more interactive but free-software-friendly for 2009?

More reviews I’ve read: davee: Lugradio-in’ makes me feel good…, Peter Cannon: The party’s over for LugRadio Live and No’: Lugradio Undead - but why aren’t more people writing about this event? There seemed to be enough there. Or are they out there but I’m just not seeing them?

RFC: Description Translation

anonymous@66.130.112.31 — 2008-07-18T13:14:45+01:00

The current architecture keeps the miscellaneous descriptions (MARC fields and subfields, System Preferences) directly in the database. Problem This prevents the user to get those descriptions in its selected language. This RFC is about moving t...

Making installing Koha dependencies easier

chris — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:24:54 +0000

I did some work with CPANPLUS specifically using cpan2dist and CPANPLUS::Dist::Deb to create a distribution using Bundle::KohaSupport as the base.

So now we can do this, add a line to our sources.list
deb http://apt.workbuffer.org/ unstable main

run apt-get update
Then
chris@ubuntu:~/git/koha.git$ sudo apt-get install cpan-libbundle-kohasupport-perl Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: cpan-libalgorithm-checkdigits-perl cpan-libansicolor-perl cpan-libbiblio-endnotestyle-perl cpan-libcgi-perl cpan-libclass-adapter-perl cpan-libconstant-perl cpan-libdata-dumper-perl cpan-libdigest-md5-perl cpan-libexporter-perl cpan-libgetopt-long-perl cpan-libhtml-template-pro-perl cpan-liblocale-codes-perl cpan-libmime-base64-perl cpan-libmodule-pluggable-perl cpan-libparams-util-perl cpan-libperl-ldap-perl cpan-libpod-parser-perl cpan-libscalar-list-utils-perl cpan-libsms-send-perl cpan-libtest-manifest-perl cpan-libtest-simple-perl cpan-libtext-csv-perl cpan-libtext-csv-xs-perl cpan-libtext-tabs-wrap-perl cpan-libtime-hires-perl cpan-libunicode-normalize-perl cpan-libxml-libxml-perl cpan-libxml-rss-perl libbarcode-code128-perl libclass-returnvalue-perl libdata-ical-perl libdigest-perl libfile-temp-perl libgd-barcode-perl libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libnet-z3950-zoom-perl libpdf-reuse-barcode-perl libpdf-reuse-perl libschedule-at-perl libtext-vfile-asdata-perl The following NEW packages will be installed: cpan-libalgorithm-checkdigits-perl cpan-libansicolor-perl cpan-libbiblio-endnotestyle-perl cpan-libbundle-kohasupport-perl cpan-libcgi-perl cpan-libclass-adapter-perl cpan-libconstant-perl cpan-libdata-dumper-perl cpan-libdigest-md5-perl cpan-libexporter-perl cpan-libgetopt-long-perl cpan-libhtml-template-pro-perl cpan-liblocale-codes-perl cpan-libmime-base64-perl cpan-libmodule-pluggable-perl cpan-libparams-util-perl cpan-libperl-ldap-perl cpan-libpod-parser-perl cpan-libscalar-list-utils-perl cpan-libsms-send-perl cpan-libtest-manifest-perl cpan-libtest-simple-perl cpan-libtext-csv-perl cpan-libtext-csv-xs-perl cpan-libtext-tabs-wrap-perl cpan-libtime-hires-perl cpan-libunicode-normalize-perl cpan-libxml-libxml-perl cpan-libxml-rss-perl libbarcode-code128-perl libclass-returnvalue-perl libdata-ical-perl libdigest-perl libfile-temp-perl libgd-barcode-perl libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libnet-z3950-zoom-perl libpdf-reuse-barcode-perl libpdf-reuse-perl libschedule-at-perl libtext-vfile-asdata-perl 0 upgraded, 42 newly installed, 0 to remove and 39 not upgraded. Need to get 3046kB of archives. After this operation, 23.6MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

The trick thing is, it will use the packages in the main debian repo first (like libfile-temp-perl above) and then use the package built from cpan if it can’t find one (like cpan-libtest-manifest-perl)

Ive only built packages for amd64 at this point (well a lot are architecture independent), but if others would find it useful I can add i386 packages to my repo as well.

A geeky way to spend your lunch break

chris — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:03:44 +0000

So I spent 20 mins whacking some caching in around the _build_langauges_arrayref subroutine in C4::Languages in Koha.
Before and After. Ill take that as a win. All that needs to be done now is add code to the script that handles updating the language syspref, so that it clears the cache when its changed.

Koha profiling

chris — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:03:45 +0000

So far ive only profiled opac-search.pl and opac-main.pl, the results are here. From them I can see doing some caching in the C4::Languages module might speed things up. If you look here you can see its doing a lot of work, and it does this work for each page. So if we cache the data structure resulting from the build_langauges_arrayref, and just return that in the subsequent calls, we should win some decent performance.
Ill work on that tomorrow night, and post the new profiles

More profiling fun

chris — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:13:36 +0000

Earlier this year I did a quick little post about profiling the koha code . And I noticed today that Devel::NYTProf (which I used) has been updated, and now has a module for use under mod_perl. So that’s my next mission, once I shake off this cold.

Kahurangi loves drumming and chocolate gelato.

chris — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 07:08:23 +0000

More photos from this weekend

Crazy weather

chris — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:26:56 +0000

It’s just Kahurangi and I home tonight, Laurel is spending the night out crafting with her friends, and the weather is mental. Kahu went to sleep easy, but im fairly sure this crazy wind is going to wake him up sooner or later. Im hoping for later.

Too much weights, not enough speed work

chris — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 09:07:06 +0000

Following on from testing Koha with memcached, I decided to test the opac with mod_perl, mod_expires and mod_deflate.
So with no mod_perl and no caching
time curl http://opac.koha.workbuffer.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=a real 0m2.993s
And with mod_perl
time curl http://opac.koha.workbuffer.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?q=a real 0m0.657s
And now opac main is down too
real 0m0.010s

This of course isn’t really testing mod_expires or mod_deflate, but certainly telling the browser to cache the images, css and javascript helps out a lot there too.

(Oh and if you haven’t seen the movie Once were Warriors, the title won’t make sense, i’m sure if you search on youtube you can find the clip)

Koha 3.0.0 Release Candidate 1, released

chris — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:23:35 +0000

After a flurry of bugfixing, and updating translations, the first Release Candidate for a 3.0.0 release has been packaged up.

You can read the release notes here or jump right in and download it from here.

Any bugs of course can be reported at bugs.koha.org.

A stable release should be following shortly.

Testing Koha with memcached

chris — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:56:12 +0000

Ive been doing some work rewriting some of the scripts in Koha to use memcached where possible.

Heres some loadtesting on opac-main.pl using straight CGI and no caching.

Maximum connect burst length: 1 Total: connections 20 requests 20 replies 20 test-duration 39.896 s Connection rate: 0.5 conn/s (1994.8 ms/conn, <=20 concurrent connections) Connection time [ms]: min 35438.7 avg 37343.4 max 39782.2 median 36828.5 stddev 1409.9 Connection time [ms]: connect 0.9 Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000 Request rate: 0.5 req/s (1994.8 ms/req) Request size [B]: 64.0 Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 0.0 max 0.0 stddev 0.0 (7 samples) Reply time [ms]: response 37135.8 transfer 206.7 Reply size [B]: header 167.0 content 1156.0 footer 2.0 (total 1325.0) Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=20 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0 CPU time [s]: user 3.82 system 15.69 (user 9.6% system 39.3% total 48.9%) Net I/O: 0.7 KB/s (0.0*10^6 bps)

Heres some with caching switched on
Total: connections 100 requests 94 replies 94 test-duration 24.899 s Connection rate: 4.0 conn/s (249.0 ms/conn, <=7 concurrent connections) Connection time [ms]: min 90.9 avg 142.9 max 265.7 median 144.5 stddev 37.1 Connection time [ms]: connect 1.4 Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000 Request rate: 3.8 req/s (264.9 ms/req) Request size [B]: 64.0 Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 4.7 max 9.6 stddev 5.4 (4 samples) Reply time [ms]: response 136.7 transfer 4.9 Reply size [B]: header 186.0 content 5847.0 footer 1.0 (total 6034.0) Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=94 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0 CPU time [s]: user 8.53 system 14.22 (user 34.3% system 57.1% total 91.4%) Net I/O: 22.5 KB/s (0.2*10^6 bps)

So without using the cache we were getting an average of 37343.4 milliseconds to reply. With the cache on that drops to 147.9 … which is a fairly serious saving. This is of course when the machine is under load. If we just run some basic curl tests
Without cache
time curl http://203.97.214.51:8080/ real 0m2.167s
With cache
real 0m0.105s

So that matches up with what we saw with the load testing

We cant of course cache this page if the user is logged in, but thats fairly easy to handle, just check if the user is logged in, if not, use the cache.
In the librarian interface there are significant sections of a lot of pages that change very infrequently where we could win a lot with some caching.
I’ve created a branch and will work in it some more, and also make it publicly available so others can test.

How is the library going?

aklibrarian1 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:58:10 +0000

It is sometimes hard to judge how your year is going mid-year. I have been recently thinking that I am not doing enough. Then I came across several things to help me rethink that.

A list of accomplishments from the yearly report of my predecessor. Quick check shows me in line for accomplishing a similar set of tasks that she had done. (I still feel she was one of the best school librarians in the business.)
Reading a blog post that used pictures from one school that participated in our Battle of the Books program. The students look happy with the program they are participating in. One of my main goals of my life is that students are happy with reading. Seeing student’s faces as they get a school banner for their Battle Book win.
The support from people in my office when someone questioned a book that is in the Battle of the Book program for the year that is winding up. Support from coworkers is a definite sign to me that I am doing a positive job.
Comments from colleagues about the materials that I send them when they are looking for new teaching ideas. People tend to be surprised by the wealth of materials that we have to cover the subjects they are teaching.
The work that I am doing on Koha. I am learning more and more each time I sit down to it. I keep thinking there has to be an end to the learning curve, apparently not.
Purchases that I have made this year to build a collection that has a more digital bent. I have found a lot of dvds that I know will help teachers in their classrooms.

What I hope to accomplish this year:

ILTL Grant - Finish the write up by this weekend 2/10/08
Send grant proposal to others to get their input. Encourage input on the goals and activities in the grant to get other’s good ideas.
Visit schools that I haven’t been to.
Planning Fall In-service for library aides.
Set up a system for books with duplicate barcodes. We need to rebarcode the books.
1. Determine which books have duplicate barcodes.
2. Make new barcodes for those books.
3. Find an easy way for the books to be rebarcoded.
4. Go to sites to help with this process.

This should be enough to get me through this year and maybe next school year.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Working on a Linux computer again

aklibrarian1 — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:58:57 +0000

I am working on a Toshiba laptop that I have put Ubuntu on. I thought it would be easier to get Koha working on it. This has been a year of cleaning and organizing the library though and not working on the computer. Going into Christmas break, though, I plan on taking the computers and learning more about the Linux system.

Koha 3.0 should be released this week or next. I am excited about the changes that may be coming. I am hoping to be able to use MySQL to organize the Marc records better. MarcEdit is great, but I need to put the records together by ISBN number and I am hoping that I can sort and merge them using MySQL

I have learned how to shell into another computer from a Macintosh. The word a Mac uses is ‘terminal’ With that I was able to put the Linux machine under my desk and just work on one machine.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Just when I was feeling at my lowest–A light shines through

aklibrarian1 — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:19:04 +0000

This year we are reorganizing the media center and trying to organize the database for Koha so that it looks better. This will be a long process that will only be accomplished with small steps along the way.

Last week, I went to Shaktoolik. I uploaded a bunch of books and got them processed and set up for their students. I just went into the OPAC and looked at recent arrivals for Shaktoolik. Each of the books show up just as they should. Their location has their school abbreviation and shelving location. Their ISBN’s don’t have anything extra so their pictures show up like they should. It seems funny, but just seeing that these records work like they should give me the energy to work on the older records and make them look better.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Battle Book Posters are finished!!

aklibrarian1 — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 23:50:25 +0000

Today I finished up the Battle Book Posters for this year. These posters will be printed out on a large printer. I am hoping that these posters will serve as a reminder to students to read their batttle books so that we have more student participation.

This weekend I will work on merging the MARC records. That job does not work if you have other people around to interrupt you. This weekend will be a good one to work on that.

Last night I couldn’t sleep and I had the interesting experience or watching the sunset merge into the sunrise. I thought we were too close to fall to see that at this time of year. The sky does get dark for a while, but you can always see the rim of light at the edge.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Back to school

aklibrarian1 — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:55:10 +0000

Wow,

It is hard to believe that the 2007-08 school year is upon us already. Today is the first day of the year. I didn’t get my list of things that I wanted to before school started, so I am starting tonight to finish consolidating the MARC records before we reload them to Koha.

I need to order Harry Potter #7 for all schools and Battle Books for schools that wanted them. Cleaning the desk was the first job and it is done for the most part. I still have a lot of books that need to be set up and ready to go, but I can see the top of my desk which is a plus over this morning. Here is a list of the upcoming events that I need to finish.

KOHA record integration.
Battle Book orders.
Harry Potter orders.
RIF distribution box up.

I also need to set up for the AASL conference that will be done before the week is out. Boy, I hope this all gets done.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Summertime

aklibrarian1 — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:14:04 +0000

I had a lot of plans of what to finish this summer. I need to get a list started and put a few hours a day into working on it. I want all my MARC records to be combined into a union catalog, I want to run Linux on a computer and start my own programming, and I want to digest all the information that I received at the NECC 2007 conference.

I know that it shouldn’t be hard to have a program compare ISBNs of books and combine the records. That will probably be the next step.

Authored by aklibrarian1. Hosted by Edublogs.

Koha “help” documentation

bhelling — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:56:25 +0000

If anyone is involved with configuring a Koha “Classic” installation with their students this semester, I would like to hear from you. I have begun to develop some documentation on how to do certain tasks (e.g., Add a MARC record, Add a patron record, etc.) that I would share. I would also like to get help on some other tasks that are not well documented.

Bill Helling
Indiana University, SLIS
whelling@indiana.edu

What I Have Learned Hanging Out in #kohanews

Andrew Moore — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:22:07 +0000

About a week ago, I set up an IRC bot in #kohanews on freenode to monitor the goings on around Koha and report them. It announces when new patches have been added to the git repository, when there as activity in bugzilla or the wiki, and some other useful events. I mentioned it to a few people and encouraged them to idle there if they’re interested.

In the past week or so, I have learned a few things:

There is a lot more happening on the wiki than I knew. The english part of the wiki is just the tip of the iceberg, I guess. There are articles there in languages I can’t even make out. I’m excited to see the large and growing amount of documentation we have
People report a lot of bugs. I only see a small fraction of the bugs reported, probably because I’m not set as the owner for any parts of the application, and I have only worked on a few small parts of the application so far. But, there are a ton of bugs being reported, and a ton of information about existing bugs is being added. I think that’s a great thing. I don’t actually use the application for real work, so I may never notice the problems that the users do. We developers depend heavily on input from our users to point out areas for possible improvement. Now, of course I wish that there weren’t as many bugs in the application, but we can’t fix them if they’re not reported. I’d rather have the same bug reported 10 times than not at all.
There are lot more people actively contributing to Koha than I knew about. Not all contributions are patches. There are a bunch of people editing the wiki, reporting bugs, testing new features, and helping in ways other than submitting patches. Thanks. You’re really helping out. Please keep it up.

So, if you’re interested in keeping tabs on the newest activity, and you’re comfortable with IRC, feel free to drop by #kohanews on freenode and idle. You can even speak up occasionally if you want!

Encoding and decoding XML data as path sequences

Chris Catalfo — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:22:46 +0000

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to represent information about XML paths and data as a string.

For example, I’d like to be able to record the origin of this data:


<titleInfo type="alternative">
<title>Special edition using XSLT</title>
</titleInfo>

as something like this (with id and data as properties in a JSON object):


{"id":"titleInfo-2@type=alternative\title-1","data":"Special+edition+using+XSLT"}

I could then take the preceding id string, extract the provenance of the data, and recreate the original XML document.

Here’s how I’ve tried encoding the XML path and data using an XSLT stylesheet:

For each text element, create an id consisting of:

Each ancestor (except the root)
A dash to delimit the ancestor element’s name from its position
The integer position of that node in the XML file (using )
Each of the ancestor’s attributes, in the form @attrname=attrvalue
A backslash to be used a path delimiter
The text element’s name

With this id, I believe I now have everything I need to reconstruct the node that the data referenced by that id came from.

After playing around with this a bit, I realized that what I’d done was basically reinvent XPath! In XPath, the preceding path in the id string would be represented as:

/titleInfo[1]@type=alternative/title[0]

OK…so next idea is to see if there are libraries out in the wild wild web for creating XML documents from XPath expressions (and not just querying XML documents). I see that the Perl module XML::XPath may offer a solution.

I also wonder if this is how XForms libraries keep track of what parts of an XML document have been edited….

ALA 2008 conference notes: ALCTS FRBR Interest Group

Galen Charlton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:20:36 +0000

This morning I went to the meeting of the FRBR Interest Group at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Anaheim, California. For those who like lots of acronyms, the interest group is a part of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of ALA.

There were two invited speakers. The first, John Espley from VTLS, discussed a couple projects that VTLS has started to promote FRBR and VTLS’s implementation of it in their Virtua ILS. The first, “Try FRBR, You’ll Like It!”, offers existing VTLS customers the chance to send a small sample of MARC bib records and see how they look after FRBRization.

The second project is of more interest to non-VTLS customers. VTLS has started an experiment to offer Virtua’s FRBRization tools in the form of software as a service (SaaS). A library would send VTLS an extract of all of their bib records. VTLS would then determine which subset of the records would most benefit from FRBRization, then create a Virtua database with the FRBRized set of bibs. The library could then set up their OPAC to link from bib records to the work-sets stored in the Virtua database. That would allow a patron to find a bib for a paperback edition of Tom Sawyer and click on a link to see a list of all editions of that work that the library has. From the work-set page, the patron could in turn travel to one of the individual bibs.

VTLS has a prototype of this service working for one of their Virtua customers, but they intend for the service to work with any ILS. The prototype seems to be quite new — Espley mentioned that it was set up in the past week or so — and during the question and answer session, Espley and the audience identified a number of issues for VTLS to work through. One issue is improving their automated FRBRization tools, as Espley said that some manual cleanup was needed to group together expressions in the prototype and create higher-level entities that VTLS calls “superworks” (under FRBR rules, the book and movie versions of Tom Sawyer are two separate works — a “superwork” puts the two works under a single Tom Sawyer concept). Another is keeping the FRBRized database up to date as the library adds and updates their bib records.

VTLS’s FRBRization service is an interesting idea, and it could complement services such as xISBN and ThingISBN by offering a FRBRization that is customized to a library’s specific collection. I applaud VTLS for undertaking the experiment. Of course, I have concerns about the openness of such a service, and encourage VTLS to think about keeping the service as open as their business model permits, including:

Making sure that any web service APIs related to the FRBR service are fully documented so that their customers (and others!) can easily build mashups.
Making sure that there are no restrictive licensing terms that would prevent a library from contributing changes they make to improve the FRBRization back to the library community.
Publishing details of the VTLS FRBRization algorithm, in particular, to describe how and why it may differ from the OCLC FRBR work-set algorithm.
Contributing any bib record enhancement that VTLS may do as part of the service (e.g., by adding uniform title headings) to the library community.

The second speaker was Jennifer Bowen from the eXtensible Catalog project (XC). The XC project aims to create open source tools and services to help libraries improve resource discovery and metadata management.

Part of the planned XC system is a “metadata hub” that would harvest records from a library’s ILS using OAI-PMH. Once in the hub, the MARC records would be mapped to a more flexible schema. Since RDA has not been finalized, XC is devising an interim schema that includes the Dublin Core elements (mapped to FRBR entities) and about 20 elements from RDA. As such, the XC schema will be a testbed for parts of RDA — as Bowen said, an “RDA sandbox”.

How does FRBR fit in? Besides the FRBR entities represented in the XC schema, incoming records will be split into their FRBR components. The proposed schema doesn’t seem to be available on the XC website; I’ll be very interested to see it when it’s published.

There was a brief general discussion after the two speakers finished. Of particular note: somebody asked how she, as a cataloger in a small public library that is not a member of OCLC, can prepare her catalog for FRBRization. This spawned an interesting discussion. One person made the point that catalogers should consider adopting a peer-to-peer model for distributing metadata instead of relying on central repositories to collect all improvements to metadata records. In the case of FRBR, this is important because one way to make a MARC21 bib record more useful for FRBRization is to add a uniform title heading. For such an improvement to be even more useful, it should be contributed the library community, but as someone said at the meeting, “While we are very good about sharing the first version of a bib record, we’re less good about sharing enhancements.”

To close with a bit of shameless self-promotion, I discuss using distributed version control systems as a model for sharing library metadata (and perhaps more importantly, changes to library metadata), in my article in the current issue of the Code4Lib Journal. While big central repositories of metadata such as OCLC and the Open Library are very important, I think a distributed record of record sharing is also needed.

Technorati Tags: alaannual2008, ala2008, frbr

Koha 3.0 RC1 Released

Nicole C. Engard — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:46:20 +0000

It’s finally here! After tons of hard work, the Koha community has announced the release of Koha 3.0 RC1. This from the many Koha mailing lists:

You can download from the usual location:

http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz.sig

You can check the integrity of the package; either by verifying the provided GPG signature (.sig) or by comparing the MD5 checksum:

5cc0914c5e8250c2491f4dbcf27d4301 koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz

I’ve also tagged this in Git as “version 3.00.00 stableRC1″ v3.00.00-stableRC1

This is the third packaged release of Koha 3. Prior to the official stable release of Koha 3.0, translations will be updated; additional issues and bugs may be be addressed. A list of these are documented on Koha’s Bugzilla:

http://bugs.koha.org

and organized on the 3.0 RM’s QA notes Wiki page:

http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:qanotes3.0

The release notes for this RC1 version are pasted in below, and will also on the koha.org website sometime soon.

Cheers,

–
Joshua Ferraro
Koha 3.0 Release Manager

And as many of you know (well at least those of you on Twitter & Facebook) I have been working on the documentation for this new release and my working draft can be viewed online (hopefully to be moved to a more collaborative medium soon) via LibLime’s Google Sites at http://sites.google.com/a/liblime.com/koha-manual/Home. Feel free to notify me of any changes, suggestions, etc.

Technorati Tags: koha

Gitting Used to Git

Andrew Moore — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:00:30 +0000

I have been using git a lot more efficiently recently, and I want to share some of the more advanced things that may help you get used to using git, too.

First, it helps me a lot to have some things in color. I have found these four config changes to make it a lot easier to scan git output quickly. The “diff” one is especially handy.

git config –global color.branch auto

git config –global color.status auto

git config –global color.diff auto

git config –global color.interactive auto

Second, I have found “git add –interactive” to be pretty useful. If you have changed several files and only want to commit some of them, this will present a menu-driven interface to let you pick the files to add. Even better, if you have edited a file in two places and only want to include one “chunk” in your commit, this lets you specify that. It’s great if you have added some debug code at the top or bottom that you don’t want to commit.

Next, I’ve been using git rebase –interactive” to be able to re-order and combine my patches to make them more readable. If you have a long sting of small commits that you want to organize better, you can run “git rebase –interactive HEAD~20″. This will open an editor with the last 20 commits in it. You can reorder the lines to reorder the commits. You can also “squash” the lines to merge commits together. This will help you make more readable sets of commits.

Finally, if you have a commit that you want to split up, use “git rebase –interactive” to “edit” it. Then, “git reset HEAD^” to put yourself “back in time” to that spot. Then, you an choose only a subset of the files or patches to commit, commit them, and then optionally commit the rest.

For more help on using git, I have really found the gitcasts to be a tremendous help.

Some of these features require a newish version of git, so if yours doesn’t seem to be working like this, I recommend an upgrade.

git ‘er done!

Koha 3.0 Haiku

Joshua Ferraro — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:38:16 +0000

To do my part for LibLime's bloging policy here are two haiku

Koha ILS, we're nearing the 3rd release watch koha dot org

Code4Lib 2008 Videos

Nicole C. Engard — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:31:08 +0000

If you weren’t able to make it to the conference, you can still see all the great talks!! Check out the videos from the conference at Archive.org.

Also all slides and videos are linked from the conference schedule.

Technorati Tags: code4lib2008, code4libcon2008

Deciding on an API for Biblios

Chris Catalfo — Sat, 24 May 2008 18:33:36 +0000

As I continue to work on Biblios in anticipation of its release (soon, I hope!), it is about time to decide on an API.

I have already put into place a simple macro system for batch editing of bibliographic records. The language is Javascript and makes use of a MarcRecord javascript object to manipulate MARCXML records.

Here is a simple example (record is a MarcRecord instance):


// Check to see if record has 856.  If so, add subfield $u with url.  If not, add a new 856 with url.
if( record.hasField('856') ) {
    record.field('856').subfield('u', 'http://www.google.com');
}
else {
    record.addField( new Field('856', '', '', [ new Subfield('u', 'http://www.google.com')]) );
}

I would like to provide access to Biblios’ main functions for use by plugins. Here are a few ideas for API functions:

Run a search
Run the current search but limited to something
Save all search results to a folder
Save record with id n to a particular folder
Edit record with id n
Run a macro on all records in a folder

I’d be interested to hear what others think: what they’re used to in other cataloging software and what commands/tools that software might be missing which could be ultimately included in Biblios.

Going Up?

atz — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:12:51 +0000

Last week I had the chance to get a hardhat tour of the massive renovation project underway at my alma mater’s epicenter, Ohio State University’s (Main) Thompson Library. Lest you get the impression from my Google Books post that physical libraries are passé, the Buckeyes here provide a striking counter-example.

In classic OSU style, the scale of the project is huge, with a cost of over $108 Million and 140 full-time construction staff.

This leads to many questions. What does a hundred million dollar book house look like? Well, you can see for yourself on this University webcam, right now during daylight hours it looks like a Bob the Builder episode. Click through the image above or here for the tour photos.

Also, what are the defining requirements of systems that are suitable for use in such a large environment? How well do their current implementations fulfill them, and how well does Koha compare?

[update] Added links. [/update]

Frankenstein, or the modern FRBR

Galen Charlton — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:19:51 +0000

I’ve been reading a “Norton critical edition” of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. The book includes the 1818 edition of the tale (the more familiar third edition, significantly revised, was published in 1831), eighteen contemporaneous and modern reviews and critical essays, a bibliography referring to an additional forty books and journal articles, and a few miscellaneous letters and poems thrown in for context.

Besides pointing to some deficiencies of my education (who knew that Igor was entirely a creature of the movies? Why was a comparatively short novel, only 155 pages in the edition I’m reading, published in three volumes in 1818?), reading the real McCoy has inspired a couple small musings.

Frankenstein starts with an epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost, but that was hardly the only literary influence on Shelley. Both of her parents were well-known authors, her husband was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she self-consciously engaged in a program of reading to the point where her journal largely consists of a reading list. Among other things, Frankenstein is a response to Milton, various Gothic works by Hazlitt Ann Radcliffe, and various poems by Percy and Byron written around the time of the famous compact to write ghost stories that inspired Shelley to write.

From a purely mechanical point of view, the 336-page volume in hand, besides containing the text and a finite number of critical essays that could be catalogued and related to each other, must directly or indirectly refer to many dozens of books that would have been known to Shelley and hundreds of works of criticism that came later, to say nothing of the movies and plays that reinterpret the Frankenstein story and the thousands of works that simply evoke the image of Frankenstein’s monster or Shelley’s response to the Faust story. If you’ve gotten tired going through that last sentence, consider the plight of the poor cataloger who takes an expansive view of creating metadata describing Frankenstein work and this particular version that bundles in a number of essays. Relative to the possibilities, the 504 in LC’s MARC record is wanting:

“Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-336).”

Nor can you get a list of the titles and authors of the critical essays from the bib record. I’m not criticizing LC or the cataloger, cataloging rules and economic realities being what they are, but there’s an opportunity that I hope the cataloging and metadata community can work towards — not just focusing on the item in hand, but placing each work in the rich web of relationships of reference, homage, response, parody, and criticism. Barring a trek to strange and weird places to assemble a generous library board that can subsidize a week of effort to catalogue each complicated work, some notions:

A metadata record can never be done — even a completely analyzed MARC bib record does not sufficiently relate a rich work to its influencers and influencees.
Of course, at any given point in time it does have to be good enough to satisfy the users and those paying the bills.
Since no one cataloger can even begin to note all connections of one rich work to another, metadata culture must promote the easy enhancement of bibliographic records (or RDF triple-clouds, or whatever) by anybody qualified (and probably, anybody half-way qualified).
Bibliographic metadata must be linkable to other sources of metadata.

A final musing — the report of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control mentions the idea of speeding cataloging record production by getting basic metadata from the publishers. I have my reservations about whether publishers will be interested in fully cooperating with such a scheme, but suppose they do — would it be too much to ask to have them provide bibliographies in some kind of machine-readable format? I think this, all by itself, would be a big win for humanities researchers.

Open Source Library Facebook Tool

Nicole C. Engard — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:29:20 +0000

The Earl Gregg Swem Library is proud to announce the release of it’s Facebook application, Swem Tools to the open source community. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, the project, Facebook Athenaeum (http://code.google.com/p/facebook-athenaeum), allows libraries to quickly develop and customize a Facebook application that provides a searching interface for a library’s catalog, website, databases, or any other search target, pull RSS feeds, and provide users with the ability to show friends their location in the library.

Requirements for the application are relatively light. A set of floor plans in image form, a database compatible with the Pear DB package (MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc), and PHP 5.

If you’re interested, check out the code. Any comments, questions, etc. can be posted at one of the Google groups (http://groups.google.com/group/facebook-athenaeum-users and http://groups.google.com/group/facebook-athenaeum-tech).

Awesome!! This found via Code4Lib.

10 Myths About Running OSS in Your Business

Nicole C. Engard — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:32:43 +0000

I just found out about a neat white paper from ActiveState to educate people about using open source in their business.

Ten Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business

Open source software, combined with responsible checks and balances, will put your business development projects in good stead. In this white paper, we debunk the myths and help you decide how best to adopt open source software in your business…

Koha & Museums

Nicole C. Engard — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:32:12 +0000

Recently there have been two press releasing announcing that museums have chosen Koha for their ILS.

Fort Wayne Museum of Art Selects Koha
ATHENS, OH and FORT WAYNE, IN–July 17, 2008– LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana announced today that The Edward D. Auer Memorial Library has selected a Koha Classic hosted solution for their integrated library system.

Read More…

Birmingham Museum of Art Selects Koha
ATHENS, OH and BIRMINGHAM, AL–July 15, 2008– LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and the Birmingham Museum of Art announced today that the Museum’s Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. Library has selected a Koha Classic hosted solution for their integrated library system.

Read More…

Also, there was one last year:

Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum
ATHENS, OH -March 27, 2007- LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has selected LibLime’s Koha Classic Hosted package. Koha is the first and most mature open-source integrated library system (ILS).

Read More…

Technorati Tags: koha, museums

The curious (mis)perception of open-source support

Nicole C. Engard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:11:40 +0000

Matt Asay always writes such great posts.

Forrester finds that European enterprises cite support as their biggest reason for not adopting open-source software. This has persisted for years, with support (or, a lack thereof) consistently listed as one of the top reasons that enterprises throughout the world avoid open source.

The ironic thing is that open-source companies primarily sell support, not software. So…while proprietary-software vendors sell licenses with support as an afterthought, enterprises don’t seem to question that they’re going to get support. At the same time, open-source companies sell support with licenses as an afterthought…and enterprise buyers worry that they won’t get support.

…

I’m just suggesting that stifling your company’s open-source adoption because of a perceived lack of support is silly and outdated. Welcome to the 21st Century. Open-source vendors provide support as good or better than their proprietary peers. Really.

When I teach my open source classes I always focus on this detail because I know that people worry about the support model for open source software. There is also a discussion going on a mailing list I subscribe to about this very topic.

If you’ve heard this as a reason for not using open source in your organization how would you recommend someone like me educate people that this is a mis-conception?

Learn Open Source Programming

Nicole C. Engard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:58:32 +0000

While the title of Dana Blankenhorn’s post is misleading (The fastest way to learn open source) it’s still a handy post. Dana makes you think that you’re going to learn about open source, when in reality you’re going to learn open source programming.

O’Reilly’s Head First series, and it makes the Dummies series read like they were written for Einstein.

Tim O’Reilly has taken everything he and his company have learned training people in programming for two decades and condensed it into the format of this series. Even I can learn with it.

I love the O’Reilly books, but I don’t have any of the Head First books - maybe I should pick a few up to learn Perl … since Koha is in Perl and I’m a PHP girl.

101st post: Love and the Internet

Nicole C. Engard — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:41:48 +0000

While this isn’t a new video, it’s a great post for this blog. I love Clay Shirky, he’s an amazing speaker! And speaking of love, Shirky makes a great point, the Perl is an act of love. The reason it’s so successful is because millions of people love Perl.

Enter the Open Source ILS

Nicole C. Engard — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:54:13 +0000

Lori Ayre writes about Ten Years of Learned Helplessness Coming to an End and how the proprietary ILS has put up roadblocks that have stopped librarians from being able to do what they want:

It’s ridiculous that libraries are stuck with the systems they’ve got without options to determine what changes get made or even the access or privileges that would allow them to make the changes for themselves.

Enter Open Source library systems.

This all changes when libraries start building, supporting, and contributing to the development of their own software. Georgia PINES and the Koha libraries proved it could be done. Now, it is time we all got involved.

Exactly!! It’s time for people to get involved!! I head from librarians all the time that wish that they could switch to open source, but their IT staff or administration won’t let them. That doesn’t mean that they can’t participate in the community and make improvements that might change people’s minds. Lori has a great list of ways to get involved and I hope she doesn’t mind me quoting it in it’s entirety here:

1) develop strong IT staff in your library or consortia who can read code, write code, beta test, write specs, and/or find bugs.

2) get over the fear of Open Source. Do some reading about how Open Source development works (read The Cathedral and the Bazaar). Find out about the migration and support options available from vendors like Equinox, LibLime, Care Affiliates.

3) jump in and play. Koha and Evergreen can be downloaded and you can take a look for yourself. That’s one of the amazing things about Open Source. You get to look it over inside and out. No big surprises three months after you’ve negotiated a $200,000-$300,000 deal.

4) talk amongst yourselves. Open Source projects rely on a community of users who are involved in the product. We don’t want Liblime and ESI to replace the other ILS vendors. We want to control the products ourselves and that means getting very much involved. Find the product that excites you and hook up with similarly situated libraries. For example, the Evergreen community is leading the way for large consortia (see http://open-ils.org/) , King County (WA) is heading up the effort for large, high-volume libraries (check out their OSS4PL site). There were many meetings ALA 2008 in Anaheim focused on Open Source, and more are planned at Midwinter, LITA, Access and other conferences so you isn’t hard to get plugged in somewhere.

Read Lori’s post here and get involved!!

Open Source Workshop in NJ

Nicole C. Engard — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:59:18 +0000

If you’re in the area and want to learn about open source, you might want to attend this event at the Cherry Hill Public Library hosted by the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative:

August 13: Tech Talk: All Grown Up: Open Source for Libraries:

“Open Source” - a term you may have heard thrown about at conferences and on mailing lists - but what does it mean? This session will not only define the term “Open Source” but will show librarians exactly how it can be used within their libraries.

Learn to separate the myths from the facts, learn about the tools that are available to your libraries and most importantly learn about how open source can free you from the costs associated with many proprietary library products. Click here for complete details and registration form.

If you can’t make this one, check out my presentation schedule to see other classes I’m offering on open source.