CALYX information essentials: Open Source Library Solution Consultants

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

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.

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.”

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

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