Program

Welcome address

Opening Keynote – Wikimedia: open projects in the age of AI

We will explore the growing impact of artificial intelligence on Wikimedia initiatives. We will also discuss how AI can enrich free contributions, improve the quality of information and facilitate access to knowledge. We will also address the ethical challenges of integrating AI into these collaborative projects, as well as the opportunities for enhancing diversity and inclusion in free content. Finally, we aim to demonstrate how librarians can play a key role in integrating these technologies, thereby strengthening access to open knowledge and the diversity of contributions.

(Presentation in French)

Preservation Module

This presentation aims to present the potential uses of the preservation module as well as the context which led to its development.

(Presentation in French)

Streamlining Borrower Requests: The Ultimate Guide to Koha Bookings

The ability to create bookings within Koha was introduced in the 23.11 release and has generated significant interest from libraries across all sectors.

This presentation explores how health libraries in the United Kingdom and a Public Library in the United States have leveraged the bookings functionality.

Additionally we will look at the upcoming enhancements planned for the 24.11 release which aim to extend the capabilities and usage of this feature, addressing the needs of libraries.

What’s happened since the Marseille Hackfest 2024?

A quick look at what happened at the Hackfest in Marseille 2024 for those who missed it and an update of what we’ve achieved since against the goals we set.

Koha funding and foundation

We will be giving a short update on the OLF foundation, the voting results, and setting us all up for a community workshop on Thursday morning for the next steps in the process.

The presentation will be in both French and English.

KohaLa: how a user group can help improve Koha

Presentation of KohaLa, its working groups, and the developments financed by the association.

(Presentation in French)

$(‘.patron’).focus() : Patron-centric Koha Customization

Patron Focus is one of the guiding values of the SEKnFind shared catalog. This session will share customization work we’ve undertaken using JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to improve the patron experience both internally via the staff client and externally via the OPAC. Strategies for focusing in on projects that put the patron first, and the limitations of customization will also be discussed.

Ilsas+ Project: Deployment of Koha in 20 Greek universities

Libraries of twenty Greek public universities are currently being migrated to Koha. The implementation architecture includes a central Koha instance (Collective Catalogue) and local Koha instances (Local Catalogues) for each university library, which communicate via an innovative synchronization mechanism.
Bibliographic records and authorities are synchronized from the collective catalogue to the local catalogues, ensuring that the most up-to-date information is always available. Simultaneously, information on documents from local libraries is automatically carried over to the central catalogue. The overall implementation plan ensures a smooth transition and minimal disruption during the migration process.
The European Union is funding the project under the “Digital Transformation Programme 2021-2027”. The University of Western Attica and the National Technical University of Athens are responsible for the overall coordination of the project on behalf of Hellenic Academic Libraries Link. Dataly Tech (https://dataly.gr/) and BibLibre (https://www.biblibre.com/) were selected after an open international competition to implement the project.

(Presentation in French)

How to kill a bug

So you found a bug in Koha? This presentation will show you that absolutely nothing can go wrong reporting it to the community. We will be looking into Koha’s QA process that requires teamwork and communication, encourages looking at things from different perspectives and transfer of knowledge. We will talk about the different bug status and how to figure out which version your bug might have been killed in. Anything else you have always wondered about? Let’s talk about bugs!

Saving the most cows: QA in the Koha Community

A talk about some methods and practices for QA in the community that I have found useful, and an introduction to the MoStCoWs method for QA, adapted from the Moscow method for project management.

Sharing the Love: A Deep Dive into Rotating Collections

The sharing of materials among libraries is critical to achieving our shared mission of providing patrons with access to a wide variety of resources and information. This has a particularly significant impact on smaller communities and those with limited funding. We would like to discuss three of the features present in Koha that facilitate materials sharing among libraries: Floating Collections in Circulation, the Rotating Collections Tool, and the Stock Rotation Module. This presentation aims to cover functionality and setup, example use cases, known issues (important bugs, etc.), and the path forward for each of the three with particular attention paid to the Stock Rotation module.

Growth and Implementation of Koha’s ILL Module

Sharing knowledge is a core part of libraries and inter library loans are a large part of that. We’ll discuss the Koha ILL module, some recent improvements, how some of those improvements were implemented by the INN-Reach ILL plugin, and future bugs that may be of interest for the ILL module.

SIP vs NCIP – Old school or new tool?

This presentation will survey the capabilities, pros and cons of SIP and NCIP, two of the most popular library interchange protocols and the specifics of their implementations in Koha.

Reality vs the Search Index: All about reindexing, rebuilding, ghostbusting, and touching all

Indexing mismatches in Koha incite confusion when search results do not accurately reflect the reality of the catalogue. In this presentation, I’ll go over the common problems related to indexing, as well as solutions, from both the staff interface and command line, giving scrutiny to both Elastic and Zebra indices and their respective challenges. I’ll review community tools that are of particular use, and briefly touch on the touch_all scripts, where they are needed, and how they differ from reindexing.

The Consortia with Something for Everyone

The AspenCat Consortia features 159 libraries, including public, academic, school, special, prison, and mental health types of libraries. Thanks to the flexibility of Koha, each library has a custom environment tailored to their needs, coexisting together despite a wide range of customizations. This is accomplished through a creative use of the various settings Koha offers, and could only be done using Koha.

Journeys Through Koha: Personal Stories and Professional Growth

Join us for an engaging panel where members of the Koha Community share their personal and professional journeys. Hear about their first contributions, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. This discussion offers a unique insight into the impact of open-source collaboration on individual growth and the future of Koha.

Harmony in Education: Integration of an E-Learning Management System with Koha for a Seamless Educational Ecosystem

In this presentation, we will explore the dynamic interaction between library management and e-learning systems through the integration of an E-Learning Management System (LMS) with Koha. Our discussions will revolve around creating a comprehensive educational ecosystem that seamlessly connects resources, learning materials, course reservations, and sharing resources.

ULRI: Ukrainian Libraries help and post-war Restoration Initiative

Our goal is to help Ukrainian libraries to restore, from buildings to collections, but also IT infrastructure, after the war, and start serving Ukrainians to rebuild the future. We want to start preparing for this now.

We will unite and connect worldwide libraries and government organizations for this goal and now call you to join. Let us know how you can be helpful and what your ideas are, and follow us to receive our requests for action and our proposals, needs, and requirements. We need money, hands, and brains, so everyone is welcome to join please.

Among these, because our community consists of Perl and Koha enthusiasts, we tend to reorganize the IT part and help Ukrainian libraries switch to Koha countrywide, centralized, and with strong support from both Perl and Koha Communities. We also target to help Ukraine to grow Perl and Koha Open Source team to combine efforts with worldwide Community.

Koha – not your average library system

Since its conception, Koha has never been a traditional library system. After its release in 2000, when it became the first open source library system, one of the first installations of Koha was for cataloguing car manuals for a manufacturer in Detroit, USA. Koha has continued to push the boundaries on what a library system can do, what problems it can solve, and how different types of organisations can put it to use.

Closing Keynote

Closing address

5 Minutes, No Tech Skills: Be a Koha Translation Superhero!

Join us for a hands-on workshop where we’ll guide you through the simple steps of manual translation for Koha. Discover just how easy it is for anyone, regardless of technical skill level, to make a meaningful contribution to enhancing the Koha manual.

Bugs – how to file them, how to test them

This workshop is for everyone who wants to learn more about how to contribute to Koha and will start with the basics. We will be taking a closer look at Bugzilla and how filing new bugs and communicating about bugs works there. Sandboxes allow you a sneak preview of new and upcoming features and they can also be used to test patches and sign-off on them. They don’t require any local installation and are fully web-based, so this is where we will be headed next. We will be doing a lot of things together, but bring your laptop and you will be able to start testing bugs yourself right away!

Usage and configuration of notifications in Koha

Learn how to edit notifications in Koha, customize messages for your users, and use both possible syntaxes (<< >> and Template Toolkit [% %]). This hands-on workshop will help you improve communication with your users by tailoring notifications to your specific needs.

(Workshop in French)

Hackfest  

Work on bugs, patches, enhancements, etc.