Irma Birchall | Open Edge 2009

Director, Calyx Information Essentials

Irma has been a champion of libraries since her late teens when she set up and managed for 3 years, a community library in her district in Belgium.

After graduating as a Commercial Translator and Interpreter, she worked for many years for multinational companies using her language abilities. When her children were all at school, she consolidated her love of libraries and technology by completing Library Sciences and Practice at Sydney Institute of Technology with high distinction.

Irma worked in Reader Services and Special Collections departments of Fischer Library, Sydney University and Douglas Piper Library, Royal North Shore Hospital of Sydney for over 13 years.

In 2004 she established CALYX information essentials with the vision of bringing the freedom of open-source software to the library industry. Irma has worked with the Koha system since first installing Koha v 1.3 for a corporate library client in Sydney in 2003. Irma attended the first Koha Developers’ Conference at Ecole de Mines, Paris, France in 2006 and continues to be closely linked with the Koha ILMS. She also provides translation services to the international Koha project.

Irma is a member of ALIA, OSIA, IA, and FITT.

Koha : a world class library management system for Australian schools

Koha is the world's first open source library management system. In use in thousands of libraries world wide, Koha is fully featured and web 2.0 ready. It is widely deployed in schools in the United States, Europe and North America but has been surprisingly slow to gain support in Australian schools. Yet in a recent note to us Jenny Clarke of Unilinc stated: "Every alternative system I look at does not have the extensibility, development, standards base or functionality of Koha. I really think it is the right system [for a college]."

Koha is truly fully featured with modules for circulation, cataloguing, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more. The theme of the OPAC can readily be tailored to suit the style or age range of the target audience. Koha is web 2.0 ready with extensive functionality for user self-service and user engagement through features such as tagging, item reviews and suggestions. A powerful indexing and search facility ensures Koha is suitable for libraries of all sizes, from a few thousand items to millions.

Koha is compliant with international library standards including MARC21 and Z39.50. Importantly for schools in Australia and New Zealand, it is fully compatible with SCIS. Koha supports original cataloguing, copy cataloguing and full record imports/export and includes an OAI-PMH server, should you wish to expose your catalogue to metadata harvesting. There is also support for self-checkout (SIP2) and for user validation from a directory (LDAP).

Koha can inter-operate with open source digital repository solutions such as Kete and Greenstone.

A small number of Australian schools have begun to explore Koha. A brief update will be provided.

Koha is open source software developed in the LAMP environment. Licensed under the GPL v2, it is made available by Calyx either installed in your environment or under a software-as-a-service model. Calyx has been supporting Koha in Australian libraries since 2004.

Thanks to Nick Cross, Aarnet and MITIE for filming, post-production and hosting.