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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

libsupport@lib.auth.gr