Hello All,

The Meadville Public Library has finally switched over to Koha! For those who don’t know, I work for the Crawford County Federated Library System as an IT Technician. My primary job for the past year and a half has been to work on the Open Source ILS Koha so that it would meet our needs as a replacement ILS. I created a new Librarian Interface, add a Clubs and Services module, added a Rotating Collections module, and submitted many bug fixes and small features. I also created a side-project called Koha-Tools that houses many useful additions that didn’t belong as part of Koha itself, such as a replacement fines generator, a set of fancy reports, a Firefox extension, and many other things.

The CCFLS also paid the company Liblime to ingrate the Zebra indexing engine into Koha, thus speeding it up well over one-hundred fold. Liblime and the rest of the Koha team gave us tons of help getting up and running. I have to admit that when I first looked at the source code for Koha, I was intimidated, but now I know the system inside and out.

I’ve never seen a more shining example of Open Source Software at work. We give, and others benefit. Others give and we benefit. It’s a great system.

Kyle