Developer(s) Koha Community | Written in Perl | |
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Initial release January 2000; 17 years ago (2000-01) Stable release 3.22.7 / May 25, 2016; 9 months ago (2016-05-25) Preview release 16.05 / May 26, 2016 (2016-05-26) Repository github.com/Koha-Community/Koha | ||
Koha is an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), used world-wide by public, school and special libraries. The name comes from a Māori term for a gift or donation.
Contents
Features
Koha is web-based ILS, with a SQL database (MySQL preferred) backend with cataloguing data stored in MARC and accessible via Z39.50 or SRU. The user interface is very configurable and adaptable and has been translated into many languages. Koha has most of the features that would be expected in an ILS, including:
History
Koha was created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, and the first installation went live in January 2000.
From 2000, companies started providing commercial support for Koha, building to more than 20 today.
In 2001, Paul Poulain (of Marseille, France) began adding many new features to Koha, most significantly support for multiple languages. By 2010, Koha has been translated from its original English into French, Chinese, Arabic and several other languages. Support for the cataloguing and search standards MARC and Z39.50 was added in 2002 and later sponsored by the Athens County Public Libraries. In France Paul Poulain co-founded BibLibre in 2007.
In 2005, an Ohio-based company, Metavore, Inc., trading as LibLime, was established to support Koha and added many new features, including support for Zebra sponsored by the Crawford County Federated Library System. Zebra support increased the speed of searches as well as improving scalability to support tens of millions of bibliographic records.
In 2007 a group of libraries in Vermont began testing the use of Koha for Vermont libraries. At first a separate implementation was created for each library. Then the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL) was organized to create one database to be used by libraries. This database was rolled out in 2011. Fifty-seven libraries have chosen to adopt Koha and moved to the shared production environment hosted and supported by ByWater Solutions. Another consortium of libraries in Vermont, the Catamount Library Network has also adopted Koha (also hosted by ByWater Solutions). Previously automated Vermont libraries used software from Follett, or other commercial software vendors.
In 2011 the Spanish Ministry of Culture maintains KOBLI, a tailored version of Koha based on an earlier report.
International conferences
Dispute with LibLime / PTFS
In 2009 a dispute arose between LibLime and other members of the Koha community. The dispute centred on LibLime's apparent reluctance to be inclusive with the content of the sites and the non-contribution of software patches back to the community. A number of participants declared that they believed that LibLime had forked the software and the community. A separate web presence, source code repository and community was established. The fork continued after March 2010, when LibLime was purchased by PTFS.
In November, 2011, LibLime announced they had been granted a provisional trademark on the use of the name koha in New Zealand by Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand. The provisional trademark grant was successfully appealed by the Koha community as well as by Catalyst, with a decision handed down in December 2013 and with Liblime to pay costs.
Current status
The latest stable release of Koha is 16.5.3.
Koha is currently a very active project. According to ohloh, it has a [v]ery large, active development team and a [m]ature, well-established codebase. The analysis of the size of the code base may be deceptive because Koha stores user interface translations alongside actual source code and ohloh cannot always distinguish them.