Koha Adopts Elastic for Search Functionality

by Nathan Curulla on Jan 30, 2020

ByWater Solutions, America’s forefront provider of Open Source library technology support, announced today that the Koha Open Source ILS now has Elasticsearch functionality added as an option for its primary search engine. Elastic adds both speed and functionality to the searching in Koha and opens up doors to the integration of more native metadata.

Myka Kennedy Stevens, an early adopter of the Elastic upgrade and Seminary Librarian at the Lancaster Theological Seminary, commented on her experience in working with Elasticsearch:

Moving to Elasticsearch has made our searching more robust and our search results more relevant. There are many more options and features to construct search queries to get exactly the types of results you’re looking for. Being able to customize weights for relevancy ranking has allowed us tailor how the search engine interacts with our records and has also shed light on data we could clean up, like unhelpful subject headings and redundancy in notes fields. The biggest takeaway for us as early adopters of Elasticsearch, however, is being able to contribute to Koha development in a meaningful way. Incorporating and enabling Elasticsearch for Koha has been an exciting endeavor and we’re looking forward to what will come next.

About Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of addressing a growing number of use cases. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores your data so you can discover the expected and uncover the unexpected.

About Koha

Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies, HTML5, CSS and Javascript, making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: http://koha-community.org.

About ByWater Solutions

ByWater Solutions is a full service, high quality Open Source support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their systems than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in first rate implementation and support services with library systems of all sizes for the Koha ILS, Aspen Discovery, Folio LSP, Coral ERM, and Libki PC Management.

Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions not only lowers the cost of implementation and maintenance of OSS, but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit: https://bywatersolutions.com.