open source

Tuesday, April 6, 11:00 a.m. Pacific time
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According to Kieran Hixon, it’s all about the sandbox at his rural library. Don’t expect to get sandy or dusty. Instead, learn how testing new ideas and innovations in a controlled environment — the sandbox — helps the John C. Fremont Public Library District

I am the back room of a small rural library in Colorado. OK I am actually a person, but working in a small (did I mention understaffed) library means my job is all things associated with the back room: cataloging, accounting, book processing, acquisitions, technology, toilet plunging... Yup. Jack of all trades.

The NExpress shared catalog has been on Koha for a little over three months now and we just added the Ottawa Library to the family over Thanksgiving. A perk of working with LibLime is that they have staff in both the US and Canada. The Canadian migration team worked away while we ate turkey and stuffing!

This spring, I had the pleasure of attending a regional conference in Colorado, sponsored by the Colorado Consortium of Libraries (CLiC). I met so many inspiring, creative, and hard-working librarians. Most everyone in attendance worked in a rural library, and everyone had much to share. One session I attended was about open source, which featured Judy Van Acker, Kieran Hixon, and Jesse Weaver, from the John C. Fremont Library District in Florence, CO.

Remember how I was a library director the last time I blogged about Koha? Life was so much simpler then. Koha migration from the administrative side is full of "opportunities for creative problem solving," like figuring out how to keep track of decisions, discussions, questions, bugs, problems, perks, and quirks related to the catalog and the migration process.

Nothing like a big sigh of relief and an accompanying yelp of unfettered joy about a job well done--a deployment with zero explosions--as expressed by Evette Atkin, Systems Librarian for the Michigan Evergreen project at the Michigan Library Consortuim (MLC). Kudos to the Branch District Library for being MLC's first member library to migrate to Evergreen.

Last night I returned from a week-long trip to Colorado--a much-needed respite after the craziness leading up to ALA. While in Colorado, I stopped by the John C. Fremont Library in Florence, CO to check in on some new friends who happen to be doing some incredible stuff at their library.

Thank you to everyone who attended today's first MaintainIT book club. We discussed "Meal Plan 1: Setting Up a Wireless Network" from Recipes for a 5-Star Library. 18 people from around the country participated in the discussion. Topics ranged from basic wireless set-up to filtering to splash pages. 

Had a migration meeting on Friday and learned that the timeline has been bumped up by two months! Over Memorial Day Weekend, all holds between our NExpress libraries and the rest of the consortium will be shut off. Questions were brought up about "orphaned" holds and what kind of message a patron will get if/when they try to put a hold on some newly forbidden fruit-like item.

Whenever I introduce some new program, service, collection, or web site feature, I have a small worry that it will backfire. If I were in a large system, I'd do surveys and interviews and find out before I launched that it would be well received. Well, I'm not in a big system, so I just do it.