Nicole Engard of Bywater Solutions lands in Montana

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I know you are all jealous! We get Nicole for two and a half days. Training and a Conference Presentation at Broad Valleys Federation Spring Conference. It will be SO great to have Nicole in Butte where we have just reopened after being flooded in November. We plan on showing her the town and taking her for a soak in the Fairmont Hot Springs…. yeah, you’re jealous! I will update here as the week progresses.

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Butte Public Library moves to 3.2 test server

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Greetings all!

Yesterday we brought our test install of Koha 3.2 on Ubuntu 10.04 up for a look see at the Butte Silver Bow Public Library. There are a few enhancements we had added missing (minor- drop downs for city and state in circ) also we “forgot” to migrate our custom reports so we have that in the works. Happily there were no 404 pages in the circ module so we are doing business for the most part.

Staff are noting any issues and Blaine and I will address most of them over the week-end, I hope. 😉 The acquisitions module is a concern for our Tech Services Librarian, so I will be reading up on the Koha wiki to see if I can work out the issues or at least identify them.

We missed several updates and patches over the past years, so no one thought it was going to be a snap to go live. After we tune it up this week-end I will let you know what our issues were and how we fixed them( or not!) in case anyone else has similar issues.

Our optimistic hope is to have our production server up with the new OS (we had Debian etch previously) and a tighter instance of Koha 3.2 by the end of the month. Many of you might know Blaine (aka selfishman) he is providing the service for our ILS that LL did originally. He also supports the Livingston Public Library’s Koha ILS, they are about  100 miles from us. He does everything remotely which works for both of us.

Any features that we might consider will of course be available to the community. Blaine and I are committed to the principles of open source we hope to continue to be contributors to the Koha community.

21 days until KohaCon 10. Hope to see everyone in NZ. For those not attending there will be pics and video from me, right here, so stay tuned. Kia Ora!

Love this article- if you missed on the list-serv check it out!

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LINK2.0 Koha

Image by nengard via Flickr

I stumbled on the site for migration at Vicki Teal Lovely’s library group, LINK (Library Interchange Network). The are keeping a “log blog” of their migration from Dynix. We did this as well, right here,  over a year ago. After an massive inventory effort using Koha’s “last seen” feature, we are ready to move to Koha 3.2 with support from the Koha Community.

Butte is also looking at Kete for a platform for our digital collection…so we will blog our experiences with Kete over the next few months.

For those who are thinking about migrating to Koha let me say it has been a very satisfying experience for us. Even though we are be a bit behind on updates and bug fixes everything runs smoothly (Results of the LibLime meltdown). We are self hosted and very glad we decided to control our own box.  We have on site and local support which many libraries don’t have.

Thanks for sharing your experience Vicki and SCLS.

Here in Butte, we will be cheering you on!

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