What excites me about Koha?

by Carmen Hernandez on Jan 26, 2015

Until recently, Koha and I had been distant acquaintances. Kind of like that “friend” you see at your high school reunion. Yes I knew of Koha but never actually knew Koha.

Well, it has been about 7 months now and although I was bit intimidated at first, I must say that Koha and I have become fast friends. In fact, the first thing I did while learning about “her” was how to create patrons, set permissions and catalog my personal collection. Who knew that I would like cataloging so much?!

I originally started cataloging my personal collection using the Z39.50 targets I had added but some of my books were so old that the ISBNs no longer pertained to the author and titles. I figured I would give original cataloging a try and guess what: I like it so much better! Granted, I still copy catalog but I found that I have learned so much more by taking the time to learn to create custom frameworks, remove tags and subfields I don’t need, etc. And when I got stuck, the magical context specific help link bailed me out every time.

Koha is definitely a user friendly ILS for novices like I was 7 months ago. Now onto purchasing that barcode scanner and going crazy!