Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

The below summary is of a presentation given a few weeks ago at the Hawaii Library Association.  Sorry I’m so late in getting around to posting it.

Save Me Money! – A New ILS for the Hawaii State Archives
Presenter: Whitney Ross

Ross looked at new ILSs for the Hawaii State Archives.  They looked at Koha and Evergreen and compared the two.  They decided to go with Koha because it seemed more user-friendly.  She talked about Koha’s and Evergreen’s active online communities, which helped her with her initial research.  Koha Standards include Unicode 3.0, Z39.50 client/server, SRU/W client/server, MARC21, ISO 2709, Dublin Core, MODS, OAI-PMH, and Z39.71.  They use the OPAC & cataloging features of Koha.  There are also full circluation features, acquisitions, serials control, and a web-based librarian interface.  She also mentioned the Amazon book jacket display feature, that you can have RSS delivery of search results, and a federated search tool within Koha.  She showed the librarian interface, a simply web interface.  They did a lot of customization to the user interface, but left the librarian interface alone as it was quite easy to use.  You can import MARC records or create a record from scratch yourself.  The cataloging interface uses multiple tabs, which took some librarians time to get used to. Their migration was done using MARCedit to combine all the records.  They created a very simple interface for the catalog – a “Google-esque” interface.  They also added links to their additional resources like digital collections, etc. She did say that the search engine in Koha seems slow, though it is anticipated that version 3.0 will fix that problem.  There is no phrase searching in Koha, and there is no browsing of items (which is availble in Evergreen).  Also, there are no cataloging templates (at least not that Ross can find).