Koha Community launches WP page

Yesterday Liz Rea from NEKLS volunteered her expertise and launched a WordPress MU (multi user) CMS for the Koha Community. The reason for the new page is that Koha.org is still being held hostage in the buy out of LibLime by PTFS. It has been many months since any new info has been posted to Koha.org which leaves many libraries (and developers) in the dark about the progress of 3.2 which many of us have been waiting for to upgrade. Not only that, but the lack of access to Koha.org has virtual silenced the community from addressing the concerns and interests of other libraries curious about Koha.
The new site can be found athttp://koha-community.org
It is being hosted by the HLT trust in New Zealand and the original build has Liz’s capable hands shaping the look and content.
In other news, Galen Charlton (release manager) has moved 3.2 to alpha with a plan to get to a beta release (soon we all hope).
The resourceful can-do attitude of the Koha Community should be an inspiration to all FOSS folks. I know they inspire me!

Koha 3.2 : The next step

View more presentations from jransom.

A request to PTFS from Montana Koha Libraries

The latest developments regarding PTFS and Liblime announced this week at ALA has left many Koha libraries wondering. What will the acquistion of Liblime  mean to Koha libraries? We are a self-hosted library in Montana. In fact, all the Montana Koha libraries are self hosted and likely not interested in becoming LLEK libraries with forked code. I can say with some surety that we value our independence and our participation in the Koha community. The ability to collaborate and consult with other libraries about feature development and customization to address the rapidly changing nature of library services is a key component of the Koha community, and something we are not  willing to give up for any service provider.

The  Koha community is not just libraries but users, librarians and developers who actually work together for the greater good of the community. There are no secrets, private agendas or proprietary issues. This community is exceptional in its international composition and commitment to keep Koha OPEN for all. As a Montana Koha library, it is our hope PTFS continues to be a proactive member of the community.

As a LibLime customer, I will be watching to see if PTFS honors the will of the Koha community by first releasing the Koha.org DNS, merging LLEK back into the open Koha community and allowing for the open use of the Koha trademark. These “assets” belong to the community. My hope is that these actions will be the first issues addressed by PTFS as they continue to participate in the community and merge Liblime clients into PTFS. Libraries do not need more of the divisive and destructive practices of creating proprietary products from the hard work and good will of the Koha community.

PTFS – DO THE RIGHT THING.

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Montana Supreme Court affirms BSB Trustees rights

Image by Butte-Silver Bow Public Library via Flickr

Yesterday we received the ruling from the Montana Supreme Court upholding a district court ruling that according to Montana Law the Trustees have the exclusive right to hire, set the duties and pay for the Library Director and the Library staff.

For those who may be unfamiliar with Montana Library Law I will link the Montana Code annotated

and here is a link to the opinion .

 

Important information, definitely sets a president.

Back in Butte…Humanities Montana says yes

Image via Wikipedia

Ireland was great and now it is time to start working on the million projects that we have been funded for this year. The latest is the Digital Film Project for young adults (YAs). We are hoping to id and contract with 4-6 mentors and recruit 12-24 YAs to begin filming in December. The project is a documentary on the YA view of Butte as “place”. We will be looking at creating 12-14 5-6 minute short film clips string them together in so storyboard fashion that will hopefully tell the story of Butte through the eyes of the YAs (13-18 yrs) We have had a good response to the project with funding from Humanities Montana for honorarium and from NW Energy for equipment. Anyone out there who would like to work on this project or if you’re just interested in it, get in touch.

PNLA Links for Koha and CMS presentations

Image by Galen Charlton via Flickr

Koha / Open Source Links of Interest

Lee Phillips

Butte Silver Bow Public Library

www.buttepubliclibrary.info

Open Source Living- this is not like Martha Stewart

http://osliving.com/index.php

Koha’s Homepage

http://www.koha.org/

Koha Members’ Wiki

Karen’s research on Library ILS and Open Source

http://dalziel.org/karin/publications-presentations/open-source-meets-turnkey-koha-for-software-liblime-for-support/

LibLime’s Blog

http://blogs.liblime.com/open-sesame/archives/384

Koha 3 Fedora 9 install without internet!

http://krishnanm.com/khh/

Marshall Breeding’s 2008 report on Library ILSs

http://www.librarytechnology.org/blog.pl?ThreadID=102

CMS exploration

Image via Wikipedia

Spent the day reading about and demo-ing Plone CMS. Pretty deep in code country, at least for me. The tree format is new for me but I think it would be very hardy and extensible. Tomorrow Joomla, it has some interesting features and plug-ins but it really looks like social networking software. I am planning on building demos for PNLA. So if you are gonna be there you can check them out!

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Koha.org gets new look with Plone CMS

Image via Wikipedia

The header of this post says it all so head on over and check the new web site. The link is to the right —>

I love the Google map…but where is Paul Poulain?? I know he is out there somewhere!

Mouse over Montana, click and see how famous Butte is, woohoo!

Computers in Libraries 2009

This is a VERY post conference post. The trip to DC required a white knuckle drive to Bozeman from Butte in the dark on ice.  We arrived alive and dove right in to the OCLC breakfast that was a great introduction to what is coming from them in the near future. The conference gave us a real insight to the prevailing open source wind that is blowing. There were presentations by Eric Lease Morgan on OS options, Evergreen and Koha presentations and new dev. on content mnagement systems that will be the successors of things like WordPress. Danny from Howard County Library system is working on Maia CMS which has a great interface and lots of functionality even in alpha. Howard is migrating to Koha this year and he hopes to improve on Maia. It is available on Source Forge for those savvy enough to install from get.

Marshall Breeding of Library stats fame was a moderator for a track of presentations. Stef and I met Jessamyn West, a UW alum and librarian extraordinaire.

We did get to tour the DC area at night …in the rain… but it was fun and beautiful.

CiL was a great experience for a couple of Montana librarians, we even spotted Bret from Kalispell on the escalator.

at least it is Spring somewhere