Koha ILS

This paper is an attempt to develop a prototype virtual union catalogue—SpaceCat—based on physical and virtual model that provides single-window real-time search system designed to display an up-to-date information of collections from the participating Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) libraries, geographically distributed in India. To understand the working of a union catalogue, the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) functionalities it offers, a feasibility study of the already existing OPACs of union catalogues worldwide was undertaken. This study showed that only a few union catalogues have functions of real-time item-level status of availability; placing holds, single sign-on, personal reading history, late fee calculation, and so on. The global giants in the domain of union catalogue such as WorldCat, Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues (COPAC) are not providing desired OPAC functionalities in the end-user interfaces. This paper aims to solve this issue by using Integrated Library System-Discovery Interface (ILS-DI) as a standard protocol to interlink front-end search interface that library users interact with, and is often referred to as the ‘Online Public Access Catalogue’ or OPAC of a union catalogue with back-end of the Koha Integrated Library System (ILS) that is specifically for staff use.

The prototype SpaceCat has been developed on the basis of Open Standards and Open Source (OSS) Software. The framework includes Koha ILS as data provider, Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as data harvesting protocol, VuFind as discovery layer, and ILS-DI-based multi-backend driver for generating OPAC functionalities in end-user interface including single sign-on option.

The study suggests that the product can act as an information discovery and retrieval system to help end-users of entire ISRO community to quickly access the holdings’ information from different geographically distributed ISRO institutes in a pin-pointed, an exhaustive, and an expeditious manner.

Many academic institutions used library management software for the access, dissemination, store and use of information or store of bibliographic record or store member data, administrative works. These libraries used different types of automation software as like SOUL, Libsys, Koha, e-grantahalaya etc. In this paper I tried to explain the data migration from excel sheet to library automation software database. Our college library ware stored a huge numbers of bibliographic data on excel sheet. I tried to convert theses data to our database and reduced effort, time and monotony of jobs.

The study is comparative on Koha usage in Bowen University and University of Ilorin Libraries. It adopted a descriptive survey research design. The sample size for the was 50 professional and para-professional librarians who usually make use of Koha Integrated Library System (ILS) at the University of Ilorin library and Bowen University Library (Timothy Olagbenro Library). The questionnaire, interview and observation were used as data collection instruments. The survey was validated while the reliability coefficient of the tool using Cronbach's Alpha found to have 0.746 correlation coefficient. The IBM SPSS version 21.0 used for the analysis of the questionnaire with simple frequency counts and percentage in tables. Similar reasons were for the adoption of Koha software in both institution libraries, and those justifications could be summarised based on philosophical and ethical reasons. The extent of Koha usage at the University of Ilorin Library is low while its usage is very high extent Kohaat the Bowen University Library. Also, findings showed that the usage of Koha software is effective and efficient in University of Ilorin library and Bowen University Library. Lastly, the two selected academic libraries are not without one or two challenges in the use of Koha. At the Bowen University Library, inadequate power supply and system crashing are the challenges affecting their usage of Koha. Whereas at the University of Ilorin library, insufficient workforce; high cost of maintenance; inadequate funding; lack of training and retraining of staff; and insufficient technical knowledge were the challenges faced in the practical usage of Koha ILS. Among other recommendations, the study recommended that university libraries should collaborate with ICT experts and bodies to develop personalised quality library software.