Appendix A: Frequently Asked Questions

Koha is intended to be: a library catalogue front end/OPAC a library system intranet a circulation tracking system an acquisitions/budgeting system

The name comes from the Maori word for a gift or donation. The programme was written by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust, in response to a need for a library programme that would run at branch libraries connected to the central library by ordinary phone lines. See http://www.library.org.nz/koha.htm (Or Appendix 2) for the full story.

Kaitiaki is the Maori word for Guardian. When the Koha user and developer community realized some sort of combination Benevolent Dictator/Juggler might be a good idea, they chose a name that would reflect what they felt his/her role would be. The Kaitiaki is currently elected from among the membership of the developer's list -- this includes the Katipo staff as well as representatives of several of the libraries and the far flung contributors of code, documentation, and kibitzing. This person is also responsible, with the advice and consent of the community, for trying to decide target dates for things like releases and features scheduling... and trying to help bring some order from the chaos ;). He also helps coordinate efforts and agendas, particularly through the mechanism of the every-few-weeks IRC meetings. Traditionally, the Kaitiaki also handles things like release announcements to sites like OSS4lib.

Katipo is a company. See http://www.katipo.co.nz/ for more information. It is named after a small native spider. The Katipo spider is a dune-dweller and New Zealand's only poisonous native creature.

They are in the Maori language, the language of the people native to New Zealand.

It's a small district on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand, wedged between the Tararua mountains and the Tasman Sea. It's about an hour's drive north of the city of Wellington, and has population of 30,000. The name means erosion or landslide in Maori.

For vowel sounds, think French: a as in far; e as in egg; i as the e in me; o as the a in paw; u as the oo in moon, dipthong ai as y in sky For consonants, wh is pronounced variously as h, w and f; we use the f pronunciation in Horowhenua. Other consonants as you would expect, with the p a little softer and less explosive than in English. The stress is always on the first syllable, with a secondary stress on the third syllable in Horowhenua. So:

koha (kaw_ha)

horowhenua (haw_raw_fen_oo_a)

katipo (kah_tee_paw)

kaitiaki (ky tee a kee)

Good question. :) The Koha developers think this is most likely a database(ie MySql) issue, primarily. Big server, lots of RAM is better for heavier use. It comes down to what an acceptable number of seconds is for any given lookup to complete. Our guess is that it would be most important for circulation side of things. Librarians generally don't want to wait for more than a second to complete a return, for example. This would require some benchmarking with real data. The next question would provide a rough guideline, although we're pretty confident that Koha could be scaled to libraries larger than CMSD and HTL. To date, no speed complaints have been received.

As far as hardware and operating system:

HLT   (3 branches, 80,000 books, 25,000 patrons)
Dual Intel Pentium III 1 Gigahertz processor
1Gb of RAM
mirrored Maxtor 20Gb 7200rpm disks
Debian Linux "woody" (the testing distribution)

Administrator comment: "The above appears to be somewhat overpowered."

CMSD (8 branches, 2,000 to 8,000 books per site, 1,000 patrons)
Pentium 200 MHz to 300 MHz machines (1 per site)
64 MB of ram

Respectively:
       HLT - Horowhenua Library Trust, New Zealand
       CMSC - Coast Mountain School District, British Columbia, Canada

Nope.

[The following is a comment from Simon Blake (simon AT katipo.co.nz) on the subject]

Were I specifying a new box for Koha, given current prices I'd put as much RAM as I could into the machine - 1.5Gb of RAM costs (I assume) around US$100-150 at the moment, and with that much RAM in the box, most of the Koha database will be in memory rather than on disk, and this does brilliant things for the performance of MySQL. So, lots of RAM is crucial, and then as much CPU and disk performance as you can afford. Bear in mind that Koha will work fine on a low spec machine (say, a Pentium 150 with 32Mb RAM), it'll just be slow, and the slowness will increase as usage increases. So you can run it on almost any machine that can run MySQL and Apache, and see how it goes, and if it's too slow then you can throw money at the problem until you get the performance you want. You'll need to tune MySQL to use all that RAM, here's what Chris has in the MySQL config at the moment:

set-variable   = key_buffer=256M
set-variable   = max_allowed_packet=1M
set-variable   = table_cache=256
set-variable   = sort_buffer=1M
set-variable   = record_buffer=1M
set-variable   = myisam_sort_buffer_size=64M
set-variable   = thread_cache=8

Make sure, also, that your disks are setup correctly, with the highest possible DMA support - hdparm is your friend. I'd observe, also, that long term Koha should get faster, and thus need less in the way of resources to run it - there are some fairly inefficient table structures in Koha, a hangover from the previous system HLT ran, and as these get ironed out and removed, I'd expect Koha to get quicker.

Library cards employ check digits. Check digits are numbers that are based on a mathematical formula devised to help detect typical data entry errors. Koha library cards employ a 9 character number, the first character is an alpha code, and the last "number" may be an X - Let's refer to the card number as (ALPHA)ABCDEFG(1..9 or X).

To calculate the check digit:

Calculate= (4xA) + (6xB) + (3xC) + (5xD) + (2xE) + F G is the remainder when divided by 11. If the remainder is 10, then use "X".

The standard for Koha is a barcode standard. The library would get a batch of barcodes from the printer with checkdigits included. Here is an excel spreadsheet to generate koha compatible card numbers http://developer.koha.org/HLT2.xls

Brief history of cardnumbers and koha:

Horowhenua Libraries get their cards with a barcode and a number on them. The number conforms to the checkdigit routine. So Koha didn't need to generate cardnumbers. It just needed to check that the number entered conformed to the checkdigit routine.

Go to your admin page, and set AutoMemberNum to 1 - that will get koha making its own card numbers. Otherwise, make a little routine that generates numbers that fits that checkdigit. But what is more pertinent I guess is how to change the checkdigit routine so it fits your existing numbering scheme. At the moment there is no easy way, apart from hacking at the perl.

Code to allow barcoder reader use with Koha is available at http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=BarCode

The undelete biblio option at the bottom of this page: http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/cgi-bin/koha/maint/catmaintain.pl . It provides a quick way to undo a mistake - and it is tucked away in an admistration 'bit' of Koha. It would be pretty cool (and might eventually happen) to have an undelete borrowers option on a page somewhere which retrieves from the deleted borrowers table (as opposed to the borrowers table).

Rachel IS a general - the general who runs Katipo in New Zealand, Rachel Hamilton-Williams. Those absolute parameters are legacies from the early work on Koha, and can be removed.

Koha is distributed under the General Public License (GPL). More information on the GPL can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL The gist of the license is that you are free to use, modify and distribute the program at no cost to yourself, provided that modifications you distribute are also released under the GPL. Obviously, we'd appreciate an email about it... and the chance to add anything we find useful to the primary Koha package.

Koha is open source software. In open source software, software developers give away the fruits of their labour in the hopes that others will help them develop the software.

See the INSTALL.pl and text files included in the distribution, or the manual["For the Library IT Staffer"].

If you're in New Zealand, a mirror is at http://www.koha.org/download/ Otherwise, try http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16466

Insert into the printer table something like: insert into printer (printername,printqueue) values ('No Printer','nullip'); And in the branch table try: insert into branches (branchcode,branchname) values ('T','Test');

Use these instructions with great care! This assumes that you are running version 1.2 of Koha...

Connect to your koha database

mysql Koha -pROOTPASSWORD

or use the "user" and "password" settings from /etc/koha.conf with:

mysql Koha -uUSER -pPASSWORD

then run:

delete from items;
delete from biblioitems;
delete from bibliosubject;
delete from bibliosubtitle;
delete from additionalauthors;
delete from biblio;
delete from issues;

The Koha troubleshooting section (in the appendices), and this FAQ section, covers the some of the common procedures a member of the Koha team will ask you to try if you have a problem.

We use the users table for doing authentication with Apache::AuthDBI, so it contains the users and passwords for valid users to connect to the librarian part of koha.

Nope. We at Koha are sorely lacking that. What you need in the systempreferences table is to use the simple acquisitions module. That is:

Insert into systempreferences (variable,value) the values ('acquisitions','simple'); Then, from the index page of the intranet page (eg your equivalent of http://hlt.katipo.co.nz/ ) clicking on acquisitions will take you to the simple acqui screen and you should be able to start loading in data from there.

See the Install section in Book 1. The -very- short answer is, you can get by with most free versions of Unix(GNU/Linux, etc), Apache, Perl (and some additional modules - which you can get by running: perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::KohaSupport'), and MySQL.

Katipo, the company that built the original Koha, makes a mailing list available to Koha users, who (as is customary with Open Source software) help each other out with questions. Usually most of the development team monitors and comments on this list as well. See: http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

Best bet at the moment is to ask the list (above).

Koha is currently maintained by a team of volunteer developers spread across New Zealand, France, Canada, and the United States. There is a sourceforge mailing list for the development team. If you're interested in joining please email info AT koha.org. Additionally, we have had assistance and contributions from Pawel in Poland, who gave us a neat translation script and has helped with installs in Poland.

Please see the SUPPORT page off the Koha website to get in touch with Koha contributors willing to do contracting work.

The Kaitiaki's weekly messages to the Koha user list are your best bet for information on features intended for the upcoming release, as well as target dates. The Koha Roadmap is a working outline of where development is headed, longer term. Please contact info @ koha.org for a pointer to the current version of the Roadmap.

Try the Support page on the koha.org site -- Koha contributors willing to do contracting work are listed there. Please contact the development team (info AT koha.org) if you wish to become a contractor-contributor.

Check with a member of the development team: info AT Koha.org for information about our current assistance needs, etc.

OpenBook was inspired by Koha, and is now called the LearningAccess ILS. Originally they were associated Waitt Family Foundation funded Technology Resource Foundation (formerly at http://www.trfoundation.org/). Under the terms of the Open Source license, "forks" such as this are entirely acceptable. OpenBook, like Koha, is released under the GPL. Currently it is installaed at some Washington state (US) local libraries.

OpenBook is now available as a Beta download: http://resources.centralmanclc.com/openbook/

Information is available at: http://www.learningaccess.org/