Wondering about the origin story of Koha?
Sure, you may have heard that it was originally created in New Zealand and that it is open source, but how much do you really know?
Check out this code4lib article: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1638
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So…I’m living and working in Australia, but I’m originally from Canada. Koha has a pretty strong presence in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Europe, India, Africa, and probably a few other places that I haven’t mentioned.
But not Canada.
Or at least…information about libraries using Koha in Canada is rather sparse!
inLibro is one company in Québec that offers hosted Koha services. I think there might be one other that advertises as well.
Other than that…I think most adoptions of Koha have been by individual institutions. For instance, check out this link about how Prince Edward Island (a petit province in Canada) uses Koha for all of its school libraries!
http://www.gov.pe.ca/index.php3/index.php3?number=news&newsnumber=7681&dept=&lang=E
Here’s another link that takes you to the PEI school Koha catalogue:
http://211.schoollibrary.edu.pe.ca/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=183759
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I would love to hear about more Koha projects in Canada, so leave comments if you know of any. I’ll continue to do research and try to promote it among folks that I know.
If you’re interested in taking a look at Koha for yourself, consider downloading the Live CD:
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_LiveCD
I haven’t investigated it fully myself, but it should contain a self-contained Linux (Ubuntu) operating system, Koha, Zebra (the indexing software), and everything else you need to get started using Koha! It’s not generally recommended for production installs, but I imagine it is a great way to get started using Koha and maybe it is suitable for a little library run by volunteers. I’m going to experiment with that at a later date ;).
Libraries && Technology 