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Unit 14: Selected Library Packages: Winisis, .........

From 2000, companies started providing commercial support for koha, building to more than 20
today. Notes
In 2001, Paul Poulain (of Marseille, France) began adding many new features to Koha, most
significantly support for multiple languages. By 2010, Koha has been translated from its original
English into French, Chinese, Arabic and several other languages. Support for the cataloguing and
search standards MARC and Z39.50 was added in 2002 and later sponsored by the Public Library.
Paul Poulain co-founded BibLibre in 2007.[6]
In 2005, an Ohio-based company, Metavore, Inc., trading as LibLime, was established to support
Koha and added many new features, including support for Zebra sponsored by the Crawford County
Federated Library System. Zebra support increased the speed of searches as well as improving
scalability to support tens of millions of bibliographic records. In 2010, LibLime was acquired by
another vendor, PTFS.
In 2009 a dispute arose between LibLime and other members of the Koha community. The dispute
centred on LibLime's apparent reluctance to be inclusive with the content of the sites and the non-
contribution of software patches back to the community. A number of participants declared that
they believed that LibLime had forked the software and the community. A separate web presence,
source code repository and community was established. The fork continued after March 2010, when
LibLime was purchased by PTFS.
In the 2010 LibraryTechnology.org survey of ILS perception, independent Koha support and Koha
support from ByWater Solutions outranked support from LibLime in every single question.
On 8 April, Domingo Arroyo announced that the Spanish Ministry of Culture is spinning KOBLI, a
customised version of Koha.
In 2007 the state of Vermont began testing the use of Koha for all Vermont libraries. At first a
separate implementation was created for each library. Then the Vermont Organization of Koha
Automated Libraries (VOKAL) was organized to create one database to be used by libraries. This
database was tested in 2010 and is being rolled out in 2011. As of May, twenty-six libraries have
chosen to adopt Koha and thirteen have moved to the shared production environment. Previously
Vermont used software from Follett.

Current Status

The latest stable release of the Koha is 3.4.4 (written as Koha-3.04.04 in the download file).
Koha is currently a very active project. According to ohloh, it has a [v]ery large, active development
team and a [m]ature, well-established codebase [18]. The analysis of the size of the code base may
be deceptive because koha stores user interface translations alongside actual source code and ohloh
cannot always distinguish them.
Koha is an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), used world-wide by public, school and
special libraries. The name koha comes from a Mãori term for a gift or donation.
• Now, your users can do it them—MORE ON VIRTUAL SHELVES > selves from anywhere,
online! Your library's catalog will be more Public shelves can be viewed by all, relevant to
your users than ever before, and will free up staff time but edited only by the shelf's creator.
Private shelves can only be viewed for those services that truly require a library professional.
and edited by the creator. Free Shelves bring Readers' Advisory to a whole new level by
letting your users collaborate to > create + share book lists create evolving lists which everyone
can enjoy.
• Koha's Virtual Shelves enable staff and patrons to create permanent book lists which can be
shared with others. Your staff can easily create online Reading Lists for patrons. Best of all,
Virtual Shelf items link directly to your library catalog! Virtual Shelves come in three varieties

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 141