Title Text

Kohacon21

Chris Cormack

A short history of Koha

Who am I?

  • Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha
  • One of the original Koha developers
  • Works at Catalyst IT
  • Lives in Wellington, New Zealand

The beginning

CC-BY-SA Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

  • Started in late 1999
  • Y2K fix
  • Horowhenua Library Trust

The first year

  • Went live January 3 2000
  • 1.0 released June 2000
  • First full web ILS
  • 4 people have code in Koha

The name - Koha

1. (noun) gift, present, offering, donation, contribution - especially one maintaining social relationships and has connotations of reciprocity.

2001-2005

  • Bugzilla set up
  • Koha wiki set up
  • MARC standards added
  • HTML::Template
  • End of 2005 - 39 People have code in Koha

2006-2010

  • First Kohacon
  • Move to Zebra
  • Move from sourceforge cvs to savannah cvs, then to git
  • The Liblime issue
  • By end of 2010 - 130 people have code in Koha

2011-2015

  • Switch to time based releases - 3.4 the first
  • Switch to Template::Toolkit
  • Trademark battle over
  • End of 2015 - 305 people have code in Koha

2015-2021

  • Version number changes - 16.05 first
  • Manual switches to sphinx
  • Elasticsearch added
  • As of 2021 449 people have code in Koha

Now

"I generally agree with Catalyst that the number of implementations around the world is something in the 15,000 range.
I often mention in my talks that it is likely that Koha is the most implemented ILS globally."

- Marshall Breeding

Lessons

  • Coopetition
  • One Koha
  • Open Meetings
  • Transparency
  • Consensus
  • Inclusivity
  • Robust processes

Stories

The future

That's up to you!