Duluth, Ga., August 20, 2020: Equinox Open Library Initiative announces the availability of Curbside Pickup for libraries using Koha ILS. The specifications and workflow for the new Koha plugin were designed by Equinox staff members Galen Charlton, Sally Fortin, and Andrea Buntz Neiman following the successful release of the Curbside Pickup functionality developed by Equinox for Evergreen ILS in June. The Koha plugin specifications were released to the Koha community with a call for co-sponsorship on July 29, 2020. Koha developer Kyle M. Hall of ByWater Solutions announced initial development of Equinox’s specifications this week.
“I am proud of how quickly our team at Equinox was able to produce a design and specification for this feature in support of the Koha community,” said Andrea Buntz Neiman, Project Manager for Software Development at Equinox. “Open Source communities thrive on collaboration, and I am glad that ByWater saw the value of this design and answered our call for co-sponsorship with in-kind development.”
The new feature will support Koha libraries as they adapt services to meet changing needs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Curbside Pickup extends existing functionality in Koha to coordinate curbside lending and expedite communications using the ILS. The feature functions as a plugin for Koha, and provides new staff management tools for curbside pickup appointments. These staff management tools include setting pickup intervals, setting the number of pickup slots allowed per interval, and whether patrons may directly schedule their own appointments.
Equinox has supported Koha ILS and partnered with the Koha community since 2009. Equinox is proud to serve Koha customers across North America with experienced support and migration teams and flexible, state-of-the-art hosting.
Equinox’s most recent Koha migrations include the Equinox Open Source Grant recipients Spark Central and Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico. To learn more about these and the other Koha libraries supported by Equinox, please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/highlights.
About Equinox Open Library Initiative
Equinox Open Library Initiative Inc. is a nonprofit company engaging in literary, charitable, and educational endeavors serving cultural and knowledge institutions. As the successor to Equinox Software, Inc., the Initiative carries forward a decade of service and experience with Evergreen, Koha, and other open source library software. At Equinox OLI we help you empower your library with open source technologies. To learn more, please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/.
About Koha
Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual-database design (search engine and RDBMS) built to be compliant with library standards. Koha’s OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are free to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development services. For more information on Koha, please visit http://koha-community.org.
