I skipped a couple of talks to do Hallway track and other stuff
Koha – not your average library system by Aleisha Amohia
- Name because software was made open source as a gift to the community
- Started in 1999
- First fully web-based opensource library system
- Bugs and external patches soon after
- Customizable and Configurable
- Used in 18,000+ libraries
- It is just a big database
- Can be used as not just a library system
- Can be used to catalog other stuff at organisations other than libraries like documents
- Configurable via CSS, fonts, languages, CMS, feature toggles, etc
- Customisable views for each branch are possible
- Special Beyond the code
- Offline circulation
- Supports non-ascii characters
- Translation capability
- Is it harder to find people to work on stuff since it is writter in perl which is effectively a legacy language? – Has a good onboarding and support for devs and things still work
- What are challengers with it being open source? –
- People worry about quality of OSS. Fix: Good robust quality procedures
- Think it is free – Have good support that is worth paying for
- DB backend – MySQL and MariaDB
The circle of life: The Digital Skills GitBook project by Sara King
- Working on project for last 5 years that is in the process of winding up
- tinyurl.com/5539zzpx <- more information
- Starting early 2019
- 5 years later project is coming to the end of a natural cycle
- Context
- Group of 60 libraries looking for projects – CAUL Digital Librarians
- Is there a book that teaches modern not-quite-technical computer skills?
- With Pandemic lockdowns everybody started working from home
- Why Gitbook?
- “Book” is in the term helped
- Similar project using github etc
- CAUL eventually went Pressbooks, but not till later
- Also qualified for free version
- Learning git was a useful thing
- Did the community really need this? – Wasn’t checked in detail, but seemed a cool idea
- Happened at start of pandemic
- Everyone online
- Supportive community was good at start of pandemic
- Took some courses in git and other tools
- Did a prototype book on another subject to get the hang of the tech
- “Gave ourselves permission to not know what we were doing”
- Created chapters of the books to give outline
- Each Chapter had 3 levels of knowledge in it. Novice, proficient, advanced
- Went public in late-2021
- Also did code of conduct, license, contributions guidelines
- Told people about it via various methods
- Worked to get people to contribute ad-hoc
- But didn’t get the amount of contributions they were expecting
- In 2023 University libraries having problems, budgets shrinking etc
- People leaving or too busy
- Some used experience on the project to get new more technical jobs
- No new people joining to replace those leaving
- 2025 reflecting on the project
- Process and product are different
- We equated enthusiastic about the idea and the process. But didn’t join in or wasn’t super into the product
- Not shared a lot or got many hits
- Goal of training people to create stuff was a big success
- People gained lots of confidence with new tech
- Support of CAUL was great, but no longer availbale
- Next? – If people like the process maybe we should talk about that
- Create a roadmap for other projects
- Hand it over to somebody else? Doesn’t seem to be interest
