Ever thought it would be kind of cool to be able to IM your ILS and find out when the items you have out are due back? Or do a quick search of the catalogue? Well I did, so here’s what we have so far.



You can login, find out what you have out, and search by title or author. It still needs to be expanding a bit, currently its only working with AIM (jabber is in progress), and there is a lot more it could potentially do. Perhaps renewal, placing reserves, and of course expanding the search. The API is all there in Koha so its just a matter of writing the layer between the IM protocol and Koha.

If people have any suggestions they are willingly accepted.

Well, a couple of us LibLimers are off to Washington D.C. for ALA Annual: Tina Burger, and I will be manning our portion of the Open Solutions Booth #2437. This year, we’re of course joined by our strategic partner Index Data as well a newcomer on the scene of Open Source in Libraries that we’re very excited about: Care Affiliates. Care was recently founded by Carl Grant, a seasoned automation veteran in libraries who most recently served as president of VTLS and Lou Leuzzi, former VP of Global Sales for Endeavor. From Care’s press release:

“[we] want to build a different kind of company, one that works as partners with libraries to jointly develop great ideas, provide needed solutions in an open environment and to do it in affordable and caring way.”

This is big news, folks! It’s amazing how quickly the library industry is shifting toward open source, I suspect we’ll see quite a few more companies form over the coming months and years with this new and exciting business model to fill the need for long-term sustainable solutions.

Of course, there will be the typical flurry of news releases at this ALA, and some very exciting announcements coming soon, so stay tuned :-).