David Schuster has been working hard to get the videos from KohaCon up on the Internet Archive site. For now you can see two videos there:
MySQL with Joe Atzberger and Using MarcEdit with Koha - David Schuster.
Keep an eye out for more down the road.
Technorati Tags: kohacon09
I just read this post by Thomas Brevik and I have to say I have never thought of sending a resignation letter to a vendor 
But I love the image!!
Today I sent the resignation letter to our current ILS-vendor. The point of NO return has passed:-)
It promted another round of “OMG why am I doing this?” It is in many ways a leap of faith. We are the first library in Norway to switch to Koha, the translation is still not completely done and who knows what bugs and surprises we will get when we go live sometime in October. This would of course be true independent of the system we switch to, commercial or open source. The important thing for me, who initiatet the whole thing, is that with Koha we are looking forward, we will get more features than our current ILS can deliver or develop in the forseeable future, and we introduce the concept of open source into the norwegian library systems marketplace.
So this is my call to you to resign from your current ILS and give Open Source a shot!!
Okay, so I’ve never used the products that William Shields mentions in his blog post, but the theme still applies. One of the biggest worries about open source is the lack of documentation. I attended a conference last year where one of the attendees asked the speaker about documentation and open source - her concern was that there wasn’t enough documentation for many of the products she wanted to use. Of course I had to follow up after her and say that Koha has amazing documentation (no - I’m not saying that cause I wrote the manual - there are actually a lot of docs that I didn’t write for Koha as well). Anyway, William Shields expresses his frustration with lack of documentation on open source products:
RTFS
This one is predictable. Some will argue that the source code is sufficient documentation. Bollocks to that. While at some point it is inevitable you will end up reading or stepping through the source code of any framework or library you use for any non-trivial purpose, the fact that you have the source code is no substitute for high-level documentation that describes the overall architecture and design principles as well as how to get started and how to do common tasks.
DIY
Another popular defence of poor OSS practices is you can get involved and do it yourself. While theoretically true it is typically completely impractical. For one thing, before you can document something you have to know it. How do you learn it without reading the (non-existent) documentation?
I’m with him on this - it’s bollocks! Not everyone using open source is a programmer - some are just average folks and they need documentation - documentation written in English (or their native language) not programmerese. For that reason, I try to only recommend products that have readable documentation
Yesterday I read this awesome post by Kirrily Robert about being a woman in open source. This post is a summary of her talk from OSCON about standing out in open source as a woman.
So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.
Another example someone suggested is walking into a sports bar on game night wearing the wrong team’s jersey. It can be the most friendly sports bar in the universe, but you’re still going to feel pretty awkward.
So as a woman in open source, it can be a bit like that. You walk into a space, and you feel like you stand out. And there’s enormous pressure to perform well, in case any mistake you make reflects on everyone of your gender.
I haven’t felt this way in the Koha community - which says something great about the people involved in Koha - but I do sometimes feel like I know less than the others on the project because I can’t program in Perl and submit substantial patches. One way Kirrily recommends making women and community members in general feel welcome is to thanks them for even the smallest of contributions - once again - something I have seen done in the Koha community plenty of times!!
Value all contributions.
Large or small, code or docs or bug reports or organisational tasks. All are valuable to your project. Say “thank you”. You don’t have to be the project leader to do this; anyone can do it, and it makes a big difference.
The entire post is well worth reading even if you think your project is creating all participants equally.
A few months ago I was asked to come to Norway to give a keynote on openness and libraries. Now I’ve learned that at least one library in Norway is on the right road
Thomas Brevik, librarian at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (in Bergen) selected Koha for his library. He selected Libriotech to help him out with this project : Libriotech is a company recently created by Marcus Enger, who starts on his own for now. I had been in Norway in February to meet up with Magnus, who was thinking about starting a business with Koha there at the time, and to also meet several librarians interested in Koha. We talked about our experience with Koha in France, and about the ways in which BibLibre might help Koha flourish in Norway.
This from BibLibre. Very cool.
As for me - I will be in Norway in November to sing Thomas’ praises and talk about openness in libraries.
Did you know that Koha is all over the social interwebs? If you haven’t seen them, check out these pages:
Ian Walls twittered the Coming Soon talk at the LibLime booth at ALA (read from the bottom up):
I’m sure that someone in the KUDOS meeting at ALA today took notes, but for now, here is a twitter summary:
Are you reading the Koha Blog by Owen Leonard? If not - why the heck not?? Owen has been posting awesome tutorials to help you with styling your Koha installation complete with code and screenshots - just the way I like to learn. Check out the most recent additions:
ALA is right around the corner and so it’s time to tell you what will be going on in the LibLime booth (#1134)
Saturday, July 11th
Sunday, July 12th
Monday, July 13th
Tuesday, July 14th