Koha Library System

The SLC library currently uses proprietary catalog software. It’s expensive, we can’t add features we want, and it won’t interoperate with our other systems like web servers, image databases, and our learning management system (which is a whole other problem in itself). So everyone was pleased when the opportunity arose to consider a different solution: Koha. It’s an open source integrated library system.

The bad news is that it’s still an immature product and lacks some features we would need, like a reserves module. The good news is that some of the developers close to the project have started a service company, LibLime, which will develop features and customizations and add them to the software. Rather than paying a software license fee to the proprietary vendor, who has little incentive to implement our feature requests, we could directly pay the developers to build the software we want.

LibLime’s approach is to treat customizations as preferences — switches that can be flipped to give different functionality from the same build of the software. This prevents forking and versioning issues, which were my key concerns with mission-critical open source software. The developers themselves take an integrative approach; they seem very interested in developing an extensive feature list in response to what librarians need and dealing with any conflicts at the preference level.

Often with proprietary software, one preference is forced on all users because that is less work for the developers. To the contrary, the paid-development/open-source model means that the developers get paid for exactly how much work they do, so they can afford to do things the hard way if that’s what users want.

Down the road, I’m concerned with making sure that the systems we implement are standards-compliant and talk to each other. The possibility of tying together a catalog/search solution like Koha with a web platform like Plone, another open source software, really raises the prospect of free and easy information flow around campus. The open source model means that these tools keep getting better and more available; what starts in the library and expands to the campus continues to spread across the entire internet.