Opting for an Open Source ILS: AUTh Library's Transition to Kohastatic.livemedia.gr › livemedia...
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Opting for an Open
Source ILS: AUTh Library's
Transition to Koha
Theodoros Theodoropoulos Athanasios Petridis Ioannis Kourmoulis
AUTh KEDEA / 30.05.2016
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
AUTh Library and Information Centre
Library Services
Introduction
Founded in 1925
Named after Aristotle [since 1954]
The biggest University in Greece (and Balkan area)
11 faculties / 41 schools Central campus: 334k m2 / several off-campus sites
60k+ registered students (40k+ active)
2k+ faculty members
419 employees
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Founded in 1927
2nd largest library in Greece (after National Library of Greece) Largest Academic Library
50 ‘branches’ in various faculties, schools, departments and Univ. Centers
1.3m physical items in ~90 collections
Books/serials but also rare and valuable manuscripts (dating from 1503), pictures, maps and other objects
300k electronic documents and books
Subscriptions to 16k e-journals / 36 bibliographic databases
28k active users
120 employees (mostly librarians)
200k library transactions/year
AUTh Library and Information Centre
Institutional Services @AUTh Library
Library Webpage - CMS
Institutional Repository
Digitized Collections
e-Journal management
Conference management
Ticketing System
Institutional Online Courses (LMS)
Integrated Library System (ILS)
Metasearch Engine/Public Catalog
Custom solution Drupal
Invenio (CERN)
Invenio (CERN)
OJS (PKP)
OCS (PKP)
OsTicket
Blackboard Moodle
Horizon Koha
VuFind (Villanova Univ.)
Library Service Software Platform
…and of course we endorse the use of Free/Opensource software in Servers and Workstations
FOSS
Brief Historical Overview of our Library Systems
Why we had to change
Closed or Open Source
Why Koha?
From library card catalogs to …Koha
1927 1990 mostly card catalogs In mid 80’s all card catalogs converted to MARC files
A few libraries used custom standalone PC software
1990: PTOLEMAEUS I Univ. of Crete by G.Tzanodaskalakis and his team
IBM Mainframe / COBOL / IBM SQL/DS
1994: PTOLEMAEUS II HP-UX 10 / C / INGRESS
2000-2015: Horizon Solaris / C++ (parts in Java) / Sybase
2000-2002: v4.1 v4.7 v5.3 (2003: v7.23/HIP 2.1) 2004: v7.32/HIP 3.05
Brief Historical Overview of ILS@AUTH
2005: Sirsi merges with Dynix / SirsiDynix acquired by foreign funds
Horizon stops evolving Corinthian Symphony (hmm)
EOL: No updates / No support
Java requirements / security concerns
Client made for XP / random crashes in Win7
Frequent client (+prerequisites) reinstallation
Slowly becoming outdated
Served us faithfully for 15 years, but time to go…
Why we had to change ILS
(Remember: we’re in long-term planning phase, in 2009)
Greek Library Consortium not seeking an open source ILS
Likely to end up again with a commercial ILS Available commercial candidates at the time: client-server
Leasing? (could cost us up to 150K€/year)
Worried about support response, bug fixes/enhancement costs
In Dec 2014 (following an international call for Tenders): Sierra
AUTh University and Library tendency towards F/OSS. Bold and risky decision!
Closed or Open Source ILS?
About a dozen candidates
Only a few fully featured
Simplistic interfaces
Not tested with data sizes comparable to ours
Decided to evaluate Evergreen and Koha
…so Open Source, but which? Koha
Evergreen
OpenBiblio
phpMyLibrary
PMB (PhpMyBibli)
PYTHEAS Weblis
MicroLCS
Emilda
FireFly
GNUTeca
Avanti
Supports MARC21
Excellent compatibility with our test export files
Supported all the main modules
Greek/Unicode character support
Tested with our bibs/items/patrons and didn’t break
World-wide installations
WEB-BASED!
And the winner is… Koha
Source code, docs, wiki availability
Award winning, robust and tested
LTS, regular releases for patches/updates
Growing user base
Enriched by institutions/private companies and individuals [code, plugins, webinars, translations, …]
Lively and active community!
And the winner is… Koha
History and Key Dates
Project Timetable
Migration Numbers
Challenges
Customizations
NSRF Project @AUTh
AUTh Library keeping an eye on Koha since 2007
2010: EU/Greek Gov. thru NSRF [2007-2013] funds libraries
AUTH Proposal: Innovative Digital Library Services
Project Leader: Prof. Babatzimopoulos (Implementation Manager: Mrs. Dervou / Technical Manager: Mr. Chatziantoniou)
(Koha is one of the several deliverables)
Project begins on 11/11/2011
Concludes on 31/10/2015
NSRF Project @AUTh - History and Key dates
One of the several project deliverables
Designed to be outsourced (+local management/tasks)
Delayed several times
International call for tenders in Dec 2013
BibLibre: Project planning/Installation/Migration/Training and Support
ELiDOC: Initial Data Checks/Translation/Coordination/Paperwork
AUTh: Exports/Feedback/Translation/User Guides/Local Training and Support
Contracts signed 9 months later(!)
Sep 2014: Kick-off meeting@AUTh Library
Koha Migration project @AUTh
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Timetable
Bibliographic Records (MARC21): 980k
Authority Records (MARC21): Total:1.5m / 411k non system generated
Items: 1.3m
Borrowers (Patrons): 44k
Serials Copies: 11k / SoH: 41k / Received: 3.4k / Pending: 4.3k
Locations (branches): 50 (+20 obsolete/virtual)
93 Collections / 21 Item statuses / 6 Item types / 12 Borrower types
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Numbers
Bibliographic Records: Greek letters in subfields / controlfields
Horizon non-utf8 compliant. Accents / special fields
Non printable chars in records
Solution: Checks by ELiDOC
[MarcEdit is powerful and open source. Learn it and use it!]
Special migration scripts by BibLibre for accents / non printable chars
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Authority Records: 73% of authority records: pseudo-authorities (not to be
exported-migrated). What happens with them?
link_bibs_to_authorities was not enough
Solution: Custom scripts were generated by BibLibre to link biblios to
authorities
Created separate migration tables (in CSV) with Horizon bib#, tags, orders and Horizon auth#
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Item Records: Some Horizon item fields in ALA encoding (ANSI/NISO Z39.47)
Exporting information in 952 was required by not enough
A couple bibs with many items Broken ISO2709 record
Solution: Additional item table CSV exports with ALA to utf8 conversion
Translation tables for ‘Branch codes’, ‘Item types’, ‘Shelving locations’
Serials (newspapers), so created Summary of Holdings
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Borrowers/Patrons: Not a 1:1 mapping between Horizon and Koha
Inconsistencies in data entry - no pattern to handle all entries
More than 50% of Horizon borrowers without (proper) email
Required Koha fields could not be populated automatically
Solution (not a trivial task/not fully fixable): Academic staff (+2k): data curated in advance by librarians
Students: some data (name, gender, email) coming from IT AUTh/National repositories (match by student card ID), some (addresses, phones) kept from old system
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Serials: Inconsistencies in data entry
No chance to migrate all serial data (subscriptions, frequencies, received/pending issues, etc). Koha handling is different!
Even discussed the option to create everything from scratch
Workarounds: ‘Good’ news: economic depression, so only a few (paper) serial
subscriptions still active Will be recreated in Koha!
BibLibre will concatenate old&closed subscription Horizon data in Koha as Summary of Holdings in ‘special’ closed serial subscriptions. Horizon CSV table exports to the rescue (again)
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Branches/Collections/Item statuses/Item types/Borrower types:
Only a few categories, so migration not attempted. Created from scratch in parameter setup
Decided to rename branch codes (b1 b001, b15 b015)
Different branch/collection/status/type names for each locale
Workarounds: Created Branch code translation tables for items in CSV
js ‘hacks’ for display of multiple/localised names (no proper solution in Koha yet)
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
Performance: Catalog searches: slow - proportional to no. of results
Staff searches and UI responsiveness: bearable
Perl (CGI)? / VM infrastructure? / CPU(s)? / Mem/HDD speed?
Ideas tried: Porting VM to other hardware
Give more/faster resources
Optimization/caching
Use other software for Public Catalog
Enable Plack (not totally safe yet)
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Challenges
VuFind for Library Catalog
Custom Greek translation
Shibboleth for staff logins (based on a BZ patch)
Biblionumber in 001 / Zebra indexing
Patron initials Father’s name
Custom description in fines (also BZ request)
Custom item barcode settings (also BZ request)
Koha Migration project @AUTh: Customizations
Conclusions
Ingredients of a successful migration
What’s next?
Last slide!
Conclusions/Recap
Everything worked -pretty much- as expected (thanks to extensive testing phase)
No major/blocking issue. No system break down. Librarians work only with Koha since the GoLive date
Some issues were reported to BibLibre/BZ and most were fixed/scheduled to be fixed
Pending issues mostly include enhancements and optimizations
Koha has it’s quirks and small drawbacks, but …
Conclusions
… We are …
All AUTh Librarians Project committee
Kudos to:
Have knowledge of your available resources, your data and your requirements
Realize what you want/are able to achieve with all the above
Plan well and plan ahead
Study Koha in advance / make sure help will be available when needed
Leave time for several migration attempts (we did 4). Be prepared to break things!
Work with your Librarians (to become Koha specialists)
configuration/feature/parameter check
feedback during test/production
enhancement requests
good practices/short Q'n'A tutorials generation
reference to other librarians
…recap: Ingredients of a successful migration
Learn from the experience of other libraries and the Koha elders - KohaCon
Exchange ideas and best practices - Round Tables
Work with the community to solve remaining minor issues and bring new enhancements - Hackfest!
Spread the word & inspire more Greek libraries to join the Koha endeavor
Form a Greek Koha Users Group
What’s next?
Thank you
for your attention
Theodoros Theodoropoulos Athanasios Petridis Ioannis Kourmoulis