Koha Tip: Highlights of 19.11

By Felicia Beaudry, Product and Education Specialist, Equinox Open Library Initiative

Koha 19.11 was released in November 2019 and includes exciting new features and enhancements.  The following are just a few highlights of the release:

Cataloging
The Advanced Cataloging Editor has been enhanced to include keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting text to and from a new internal clipboard.  This makes it easier to duplicate fields and subfields. Additionally, access to a virtual keyboard has been added for entering diacritical marks.

Circulation
Koha’s Patron Clubs tool has been available since version 17.05, allowing patrons to be enrolled in clubs managed by the library (e.g., summer reading, book clubs, etc.).  The new Club Holds features allows staff to place a title level hold for club members in batch.  Each member of the club is added to the holds queue for the title in random order.

Claims Returned features have been enhanced. Circulation staff may now mark an item claimed returned directly from the list of checkouts on a patron record, rather than go to the item record.  An alert is now available to notify staff when a patron has more than a defined number of claimed items. The system can be configured to charge a fee automatically to a patron for a claimed item or ask staff whether a fee should be charged.  These enhancements are configured with new system preferences.

A new alert regarding Patron Age notifies staff when a patron’s age is not within the configured age range of the patron category.  An action button allows for changing the patron category directly from the alert dialogue.

Accounting
Koha has long allowed Adult and Organizational patron account types to act as guarantors to Child and Professional types.  Guarantors will now have the option of paying off all charges for their guarantees when making online payments in the public catalog.


For libraries that use Cash Registers, those devices can be added to Koha through Administration and connected to cash payments.  This will provide a new way to track and report on transactions.

Reports
Staff will now have the option to perform Batch Patron Modification directly from the output of a report that lists borrower numbers or library card numbers.  The will significantly streamline the workflow when a report is needed to identify patrons requiring modification.

Administration
Item Types may now be limited to one or more libraries within a Koha instance.  This gives greater flexibility to library systems and consortia that want to allow for individual items types among their libraries.

These are just a few of the many features and enhancements of 19.11.  For more information, see the official Koha 19.11 release notes at https://koha-community.org/koha-19-11-release/.

Consolidation vs Open Source

By Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst at Equinox Open Library Initiative

Acquisitions and consolidations are nothing new in the library world. Still, each one triggers a wave of shock and Marshall Breeding gets a chance to update his very illuminating graphic showing mergers and acquisitions: https://librarytechnology.org/mergers/. There are always promises of long term benefits to the customer when their ILS is acquired. However, the only thing the customer is sure to get are press releases and uncertainty.

The cause of uncertainty is simple – the future of your ILS is in doubt. Unless the two products are for very different parts of the market, the acquiring vendor is likely to phase out one as redundant. It may be gradual and gentle and may not start for years but it will happen so long as as developing and supporting different products is an additional cost rather than additional revenue.

For libraries that value stability and don’t want to be subject to the whims of the market, open source ILSes, especially Evergreen and Koha, are bedrocks of constance. Open source is a collection of licenses that say the code is freely available to use and expand upon. You can use that granted right without expiration, use the software forever, no uncertainty, no loopholes. Still, who guarantees the future? Times change and ILSs have to adapt. A stable ILS is one that will be supported for the foreseeable future.  You should be able to adopt an ILS and expect to get ten years out of it. So, who does the development, who pushes forward, who in essence takes the place of an ILS corporation? Again, here open source wins because the answer is easy: the community.

A community is a broad idea but that breadth is a part of a healthy open source community. In a recent informal poll the Evergreen community reported adding 64 new libraries in 2019.  Stability is also reflected in the investment those libraries make. For example, look at the release notes for Koha and Evergreen as each gets several new versions every year – each with substantial community investment from user libraries. Looking at a recent release of Evergreen alone the release  had contributions from 32 coders and documentation writers. Seven institutions funded development and fourteen contributed the time of employees resulting in 36 new features. These releases are twice a year plus monthly bug fixes. That’s a heck of a lot of development team with a breadth of input, testing and documentation.

There is another element of course – support. Most ILS vendors offer support as well as the software itself. Access to open source software is not controlled but companies do offer hosting and support. It is possible for a hosting or service company to merge but even then your ILS can’t go away. Simply put, you can change to another service provider – use uninterrupted.

In sum, open source offers more security and options to allow continuity of service putting control in the hands of the library though inalienable privileges. Increasingly  our society libraries are a safety net. Safety nets should be steady and unmoving and they can not do that if they are held captive by the business whims of others.