Would you ever dare use an open source cataloging program for your library catalog? While I was in Library School two years ago, we played around with Koha in one of my classes. It was an interesting experience and one that I think more librarians should have. While Koha offers some amazing features similar to those used by online bookstores such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble it is also fairly simple to set up. That said, because we were using it for free, we did not have technical support and so there were some things that we struggled to figure out. If you decide to use it for your library then you would want to pay for technical support. Has anyone else tried either as an experiment or with your library catalog an open source program?



















We use Koha and love it. We’re a senior high school in Auckland New Zealand and make great use of the web 2.0 features of Koha: tagging, patron comments and reviews, shared booklists, 5-star ratings etc. We got around the technical support issues by using a hosted solution (i.e. someone else looks after the server and we pay a monthly fee- roughly US$15/mth). Works very well for us. Liblime and Katipo can provide hosting.
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Hmmm tons and tons of libraries around the world are using Koha.
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=kohausers
My library system (NEKLS) has a consortium of 23 libraries using Koha. We have been pretty happy with it so far. We are supported by LibLime, I’m sure we would not have been as successful without them.
It has not been without drama, but we have been active in the Koha community (a necessity for success) and have gotten many answers to our questions from the very kind folks there.
I am lookiong into using Koha to upgrade my school library system and would loveto hear what anyone using it thinks of it. Did you consider using other systems? Why did you choose KOHA? I work in a large secondary (aged 11-18) school in England.
I enjoy this blog