Yep - you read that right - it’s finally coming!!! Years after the first KohaCon in France, the planning of a US conference has finally begun.

April 16-17th I’m looking to host a Koha innovations and sharing group here in the US. - Plano Texas would be the place. This is a reserved date - more info to come.

This 2 day workshop would have lab access and presentation space. There would be a charge to cover lunch both days and other misc expenses. Any leftover money would be given to the KUDOS users group as seed money.

If you would be interested in attending, presenting or sharing - something that you have done along with sitting in and learning about what other users and what the developers are working on let me know!

dschust1@tx.rr.com

David Schuster
Plano Texas
going live Jan 5th, 2009 as a LibLime customer! - this is open to all koha users and those interested. More information on the schedule to come after I figure out interest.

Read the email and keep up the planning by signing up for the Koha List.

[update] Check out the Koha Wiki for more info. [/update]

I have mentioned governments going open source before, but now I get to repeat an announcement about a government using Koha to automate all of the government libraries.

The Government of Kerala, a tiny well-developed state lying in the south-west part of India, has made a decision in principle to make Koha as its official software for computerization of libraries under Government control.

Read the entire press release.

Technorati Tags: koha

This from the Koha mailing list:

Hi folks,

I’m happy to announce that a packaged release of Koha 3.00.00 is now available. You can download from the usual location:

http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00.tar.gz
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00.tar.gz.sig

Release notes and more information can be found on the official Koha site.

Technorati Tags: koha, ils, libraries, open source

Recently there have been two press releasing announcing that museums have chosen Koha for their ILS.

Fort Wayne Museum of Art Selects Koha
ATHENS, OH and FORT WAYNE, IN–July 17, 2008– LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana announced today that The Edward D. Auer Memorial Library has selected a Koha Classic hosted solution for their integrated library system.

Read More…

Birmingham Museum of Art Selects Koha
ATHENS, OH and BIRMINGHAM, AL–July 15, 2008– LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, and the Birmingham Museum of Art announced today that the Museum’s Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. Library has selected a Koha Classic hosted solution for their integrated library system.

Read More…

Also, there was one last year:

Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum
ATHENS, OH -March 27, 2007- LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has selected LibLime’s Koha Classic Hosted package. Koha is the first and most mature open-source integrated library system (ILS).

Read More…

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I want to note that Venezuela’s National Library doesn’t publish news in English, so I’m quoting an unofficial source, but this is still awesome!!

On the first half of 2008, Venezuela’s National Library (BNV) evaluated the Koha ILS and other FLOSS-based ILSs, together with a proprietary ILS, and decided to deploy Koha in two phases for the Library’s catalogue, which includes more than two million records, and the National Public Library System.

Thanks José Miguel Parrella Romero for letting us know!

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This from LibLime:

Anaheim, CA–July 1, 2008–LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries and the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project– an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries– have announced a new partnership agreement to ensure future compatibility between the XC project and Koha, the first open-source integrated library system.

The XC/LibLime partnership will ensure that the open-source software being developed as part of the XC project and the Koha open-source integrated library system will be fully compatible with each other, enabling current and future users of Koha to take advantage of the added capabilities for managing and distributing metadata that XC will offer. These benefits include facilitating the ability to combine legacy metadata with emerging schemas, and delivering library content to web content management and learning management systems.

Keep the open source library partnerships coming!!

Technorati Tags: liblime, koha, extensible catalog

It’s finally here! After tons of hard work, the Koha community has announced the release of Koha 3.0 RC1. This from the many Koha mailing lists:

You can download from the usual location:

http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz.sig

You can check the integrity of the package; either by verifying the provided GPG signature (.sig) or by comparing the MD5 checksum:

5cc0914c5e8250c2491f4dbcf27d4301 koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz

I’ve also tagged this in Git as “version 3.00.00 stableRC1″ v3.00.00-stableRC1

This is the third packaged release of Koha 3. Prior to the official stable release of Koha 3.0, translations will be updated; additional issues and bugs may be be addressed. A list of these are documented on Koha’s Bugzilla:

http://bugs.koha.org

and organized on the 3.0 RM’s QA notes Wiki page:

http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:qanotes3.0

The release notes for this RC1 version are pasted in below, and will also on the koha.org website sometime soon.

Cheers,

–
Joshua Ferraro
Koha 3.0 Release Manager

And as many of you know (well at least those of you on Twitter & Facebook) I have been working on the documentation for this new release and my working draft can be viewed online (hopefully to be moved to a more collaborative medium soon) via LibLime’s Google Sites at http://sites.google.com/a/liblime.com/koha-manual/Home. Feel free to notify me of any changes, suggestions, etc.

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