Aged Care Providers Keep Track of Knowledge Resources with Koha

Many older Australians maintain active, independent lifestyles until an advanced aged.  For others, ageing is associated with increasing frailty and dependence.  Australia’s aged care providers deliver wonderful services, caring for and supporting these most vulnerable of our citizens.  Aged care organisations must cope with increasing service demands whilst delivering high quality services with limited resources.  Two service providers have established innovative library services to assist families and other care organisations to access specialised knowledge and resources.

The Brotherhood of St Laurence is a leading advocate for the disadvantaged, working across Victoria to prevent and alleviate poverty, servicing all sections of our community.  Community aged care services for the southern region are located at Frankston.  Recognising the particular challenges faced by carers of people living with dementia, a Dementia Resources Library has been created where carers can search for, identify and borrow a range of resources including books, CDs, DVDs and games.

Multicultural Aged Care, located in Mile End, Adelaide, South Australia, specialises in promotion  of culturally appropriate care.  Multicultural Aged Care has a rich collection of multicultural and multilingual materials that it makes available for loan to other aged care providers and their staff, including nurses, diversional and lifestyle therapists and other health care professionals.

By cataloguing their collections in a library management system, the services achieve:
ability to search for relevant materials by keyword, title, author, subject or material type;
ability to track loans to clients, know when they are due and process renewals and returns;
ability to report on resource usage by client, client category, material type and subject;
preservation and protection of their valuable resources.

Both have chosen CALYX information essentials to host their library off-site, thereby removing concerns with the tasks of administering a server.  The libraries gain access to expert Koha advice and support whenever it is needed.  CALYX ensures that the library  data is backed up several times per day and provides upgrades for each new feature release of Koha.  Service staff can then focus on the needs of their clients, free of concerns about system maintenance.

About Brotherhood of St Laurence:
The Brotherhood of St Laurence is an Australian not-for-profit organisation that works toward a vision of an Australia free of poverty.  Based in Melbourne, the Brotherhood has a national profile. It undertakes research, delivers services and advocates on behalf of people experiencing disadvantage.  It works not just to alleviate poverty but to prevent it.  For more information visit www.bsl.org.au

About Multicultural Aged Care:
By supporting service providers and advising government, Multicultural aged care works to strengthen ethnic communities’ capacity to develop and support the aged and community care needs of their older people.  More information is available from www.mac.org.au

About CALYX:
CALYX information essentials has provided Koha support in Australia since 2003.  We provide fully hosted services or support for in-house installations.  Our services include system configuration, data conversion and import, training and post installation support.  For more information contact Irma Birchall or visit www.calyx.net.au.  Try our Koha demonstration system at http://demo.calyx.net.au

Koha 3.12 Released

The Koha release team has announced the release of Koha 3.12.0 and pronounced it “the best version of Koha yet”. According to Release Manager Jared Camins-Esakov, Koha 3.12 contains 1,470 patches since the release of 3.10. These have added 21 new features and 160 enhancements as well as numerous bug fixes. A significant new feature is patron self-registration in the OPAC, whilst the appearance of the staff client has been given another modernising makeover. Full details are in the release notes: http://koha-community.org/files/2013/05/Koha-3.12-release-notes.pdf

We at CALYX extend our congratulations to Jared, the whole release team and everyone who contributed to Koha 3.12.

Hosted clients of CALYX are currently running Koha 3.10.4 with some minor enhancements. A couple of significant patches were pulled forward from a future release and the upgrade was performed in mid-April.

CALYX will expect to deploy Koha 3.12 to our hosted clients in October or November 2013. Our policy is to monitor the progress of the release, allowing it to pass through a number of monthly maintenance releases before deploying the version into production on our servers. This ensures that any problems in the release are well and truly ironed out before the software is made available to our clients. In this way, we ensure our clients have access to the latest features of Koha whilst receving only stable, robust software.

For more information about Koha visit http://koha-community.org

For more information about CALYX’ Koha services, please contact us.

Tabor College NSW live on Koha

Tabor College NSW has converted to the Koha Library Management system, going live in March 2013.

Tabor NSW has joined with Emmaus Bible College and the Korean Program of the Sydney College of Divinity to share ILS resources.  The combined catalogue makes a wider range of resources available to students of Emmaus and Tabor NSW.  CALYX information essentials provides hosting of the Koha system and support services to the three libraries.  The Colleges achieve significant cost benefits by sharing their ILS resources.

During the change over, Calyx provided Koha configuration, data conversion and training services and provided each library with its own OPAC portal.   Bibliographic data were converted from the Aleph system previously used by Tabor NSW.  The combined catalogue now contains 44,000 bibliographic records.  OPAC users are able to select searches on their own college collection or on the combined catalogue and can reserve from other libraries as need dictates.

About Tabor College NSW:
Founded in 1992, Tabor NSW is located at Miranda in Sydney’s south.  Providing tertiary education  in Christian ministry and counselling, Tabor NSW has  to “to facilitate the restoring and sustaining of wholeness in the lives of people” at the core of its mission.  For more information visit:

http://www.tabornsw.edu.au/

About CALYX information essentials:
A division of Calyx Group Pty Limited, CALYX  has provided Koha support services in Australia since 2003.  We ensure that the freedoms of open source software are available to libraries, even whilst hosted in the cloud.  Visit our web site at http://calyx.net.au or contact us.

Another Koha Upgrade Provided to CALYX hosted clients

All hosted clients of CALYX information essentials are now running Koha version 3.8.6. The upgrade was completed overnight on Monday 19 November 2012. All libraries experienced a seamless transition to the new Koha version.

Koha 3.8.6 is the current stable release version of the project coordinated at koha-community.org.

Koha is developed and maintained by an active world wide community of librarians and software developers. Koha is used by four national libraries and thousands of academic, public, school and special libraries across the globe.

CALYX provides regular upgrades as part of our ‘Hosting with Support’ agreement with libraries around Australia and the Pacific. We ensure that only stable, robust software is made available to our clients, whilst providing timely access to the latest features and benefits of Koha.

In addition to the software upgrade, we have now made available to all libraries the English New Zealand (en-NZ) translation which restores our familiar spelling of ‘catalogue’ (rather than the US ‘catalog’) and enables librarians to reserve, issue and return instead of holding, checking out and checking in. We like this, but the US translation (en) remains available at the click of a mouse for those who prefer it.

For more information about Koha or CALYX’ services, please contact us.

Australian Public Library Chooses Koha

Shire of Derby West Kimberley has become the first local government area in Australia to choose Koha to support the delivery of its public library services.

The Shire has established public libraries at Derby and Fitzroy Crossing to support access to information services by its diverse and geographically dispersed community. CALYX information essentials has been contracted to provide Koha services including software implementation and configuration, data conversion, training and ongoing support. The system will be hosted off site in Calyx’ state of the art data centre. Derby and Fitzroy Crossing Public libraries are expected to be live on Koha before July 2012.

Koha is the world’s first and foremost open source library management system. Used around the world by academic, public, school and special libraries, Koha is fully featured and web 2.0 rich. Originally developed for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is now developed and maintained by a world wide community of librarians and software developers. The home of the Koha community is at http://koha-community.org.

Kate Hithersay, Library Manager for Shire of Derby West Kimberley, stated that the Shire’s current library system lacks functionality and flexibility and is approaching end of life. “In selecting a replacement system, price was a factor but by no means the only consideration”, Kate said. She feels that Koha’s full feature set is impressive and consistent with the Shires needs. According to Kate, the library wanted to be able to explore the product features before becoming engaged with a vendor. Calyx provided a demonstration system that enabled staff to do so in considerable depth.

According to Irma Birchall, Calyx Director, “the cloud computing model we offer will enable the Shire to save time and money, achieve scalability and flexibility with predictable costs, and to focus on reader needs rather than infrastructure. This is Calyx’ first deployment of Koha to the public library sector in Australia. We used to champion Koha because of the advantages of the open source approach. Now these advantages are realised and we champion Koha’s features, reliability and flexibility. We are delighted to assist Shire of Derby West Kimberley to improve the library services available to its community.”

Koha 3.8 Released

The Koha community announced the release of Koha version 3.08.00.000 on 23 April 2012. The Koha release team, headed by Paul Poulain of Biblibre, France has delivered another significant upgrade in accordance with the planned release schedule. CALYX salutes all involved!

Koha is the world’s first free and open source integrated library management system. Originally developed by Katipo Communications of New Zealand for Horowhenua Library Trust, Koha is now maintained and developed by a world wide community of librarians and software professionals. The Koha community is located at www.koha-community.org.

Koha 3.8.0 is a major feature release containing over 130 enhancements with over 1000 changesets from 71 developers.

Highlights of Koha 3.8 include Hourly Loans (important for academic libraries) and a new style sheet improving the appearance and usability of the staff client. Other significant improvements include:

  • star ratings in OPAC;
  • authority matching improvements;
  • in Acquisitions, cancelled orders tracking and claims management improvements;
  • ability to search for borrowers on email or phone number only;
  • in Circulation, user configurable slips (now driven under the Notices editor), improvements to the offline circulation module and support for floating collections;
  • more options in Advanced Search;
  • several ‘under the hood’ changes to improve Koha’s performance for large collections.

The release notes for Koha 3.8.0 may be found here: http://koha-community.org/koha-3-8-0-released/

This release will be followed monthly by maintenance releases, with the next major feature release (Koha 3.10) due in October 2012.

CALYX will liaise with clients individually regarding their upgrade schedule to Koha 3.8.

 

 

All hosted clients of Calyx have now been upgraded to Koha version 3.06.04.000.

Latest Koha Upgrade Completed

All hosted clients of CALYX have now been upgraded to Koha version 3.06.04.000.  This is the current stable release of Koha.

The upgrade was completed in the week ending 16 March 2012.  A small glitch in Koha’s self-check-out module required a quick fix; apart from that, the upgrade was without incident.

We are now looking forward to the release of Koha 3.8 (due in April).  As always, Calyx will monitor progress of the 3.8 release with a view to upgrading all our hosted clients prior to the end of the year.

We recommend that non-hosted clients also now upgrade to Koha 3.6.  All Koha installations should by now be upgraded to at least version 3.04.007, for security reasons.

Koha Version 3.6 is major feature release, containing 85 enhancements and 356 bugfixes.

Just listing a few  …

  • Z3950 results highlighting
  • Improve controls for cloning and deleting MARC subfields
  • Capability to blank subfields in Batch Modification
  • Show a warning if placing a hold incurs a charge
  • Paging on the opac detail page, allowing the user to move through search results
  • Show number of comments on the “Comments” tab in OPAC
  • Partial fine payments
  • If a patron search returns one result, redirect to patron details page
  • Added ISBN filter
  • Enable Koha to fetch book covers from Open Library

Enjoy! http://koha-community.org/koha-3-6-0-released/#more-2830

 

 

CALYX at VALA 2012 6-9 Feb

We’ll be at the Conference in Melbourne, 6-9 Feb. If you’re attending, be sure to come and see us at Booth #27!

Chris Cormack from Catalyst IT who wrote the first line of Koha’s code in 1999 and knows Koha inside out will be there too.

VALA is the conference for all matters relating to information technology for libraries.

 

 

Hosted Koha clients upgraded to latest version

All hosted clients of CALYX information essentials are now running Koha 3.04.05 which is the current stable release. The upgrades were completed last week with no adverse events being experienced by clients.

CALYX’ practice is to upgrade our hosted clients twice per annum. Upgrades are timed to ensure that clients receive prompt access to the latest software developments whilst being offered only stable software that has been tested and proved not only by CALYX personnel but by librarians around the world. The Koha project makes major feature releases twice per annum, in April and October. Every month there is a maintenance release that applies patches to any problem software that has been identified since the previous release, where the patch has been tested and signed off by users, has passed QA and been accepted by the Release Manager for inclusion in the next release. The Release Manager for Koha 3.04 and for the forthcoming Koha 3.06 is Chris Cormack, of Catalyst IT in New Zealand. The Release Manager for Koha 3.08, due in April 2012, will be Paul Poulain of Biblibre in France. The outcome for users of Koha is that they receive stable software that does what it is supposed to do.

Koha just keeps getting better and better. And it works. For more information about Koha visit the community’s web site: http://koha-community.org/ or call Irma today on 0413 510 717

 


CALYX is proud to sponsor KohaCon11 in Thane, Mumbai, India

KohaCon11 will be the fourth international gathering of the Koha community and will be held in Thane, India from 31 October to 2 November 2011. The three day conference will be followed by a hackfest for Koha developers from 4 November to 6 November.

KohaCon is a free conference. Previous conferences have been held in Paris (France), Plano (Texas, USA) and Wellington (New Zealand). The Koha community is excited to be taking KohaCon to India where deployment of Koha is widespread and flourishing. This promises to be the largest KohaCon ever with several hundred delegates from around the world expected to attend.

Registrations are still open.

As we did in Wellington in 2010, CALYX is proud to be a sponsor of KohaCon11 in Thane.

With no registration fees and a strong Australian dollar, this conference provides a great opportunity for Australian librarians who wish to influence the future direction of Koha. Rub shoulders with librarians and software developers from the USA, UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and other European, Asian and African countries. Or simply come to learn more about Koha and the advantages of the free software model. Whilst you are there, take the opportunity to see something of the rich culture and history of India, an emerging world power. CALYX directors will be making a side trip or two and would love you to join us!

Information about KohaCon11 in Thane can be found here: http://kohacon11.vpmthane.org/ocs/index.php/k/k11 or contact us: irma@calyx.net.au

 

 

Kete

Australian Library and Information Association
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Contact us today!

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