Koha Rap
Originally presented at the session "My Favorite Tools" at the Medical Library Association's annual meeting on Sunday, 20 May, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. Like most of my poetry entered in competitions, it did not win, due to blatant good taste on the part of the judges and audience. My congratulations to the winners.
My favorite library tool is Koha. What's a Koha?
It's a fully-fledged open source ILS.
Free to download, free to use, free to modify,
It's the gateway to your library's holdings.
What does it do? It does everything an ILS does
Cataloging, circulation, serials, and an OPAC
It'll do reports, inventory, lists, overdues
Acquisitions, Self checkout, marc import, marc export
Need a plug-in? Get a plug-in! Offline circulation? Sure!
Or Coverflow that shows you what was recently checked in.
Hardware? Well you need a server. Powerful enough to run it
A gigabyte or two of RAM and twenty gig hard drive should do
Monitor and keyboard? You probably have them somewhere.
A small library doesn't need hardware that's complicated
Get a server in the cloud for twenty US bucks per month
Or you can even run it on a raspberry pi.
What do you need to run it? You need Linux. What's a Linux?
It's an open-source free to download operating system.
Open source, free to download, comes in different flavors
There's a learning curve but you can find and read a book or two
Google helps you get across the Linux barrier
And if I can learn it well then so can you.
When it's all set up it will run on your web browser
No proprietary interface for Koha
Setup screens are simple and it's easy to configure
Staff learning curve? A little, but it isn't too hard.
Want to modify it? Change a printout? Go ahead.
There's no license telling you no.
Want an item type? Then you can add an item type.
Want a new marc tag or some changes to the search screen?
Want to integrate with Moodle, add a CMS, LMS?
You can do it, check the Wiki--see what other folks have done.
Something new to index? It's all possible.
You can change it to your heart's content.
Is Koha sustainable? It's been around for twenty years
It's used by libraries public, academic,
Special, in consortia, libraries all alone
Europe and the Arab world, all across India
Africa, Oceania, and in the Americas
It's probably going to be around tomorrow.
Don't want to go it alone? Well then you don't have to.
Support and hosting sites are here and there and everywhere
They can program special features if you really want them
Can't tell you the cost, they'll have to write a quote for you
If you don't like them, you can move your Koha somewhere else.
No proprietary software, remember?
What do I like least? Well, some modules need some tweaking.
What do I like the most? That it's a group effort.
All the coding, all the writing goes to the community
If you sponsor something, squash a bug, do some coding
Write a page or chapter for the users' manual.
Everybody gets to use it. Koha is ours.
Koha-community dot org
(come and join us)
Koha-community dot org
(we're pretty friendly)
Koha-community dot org
(we don't bite too much)
Koha-community dot org
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.