Resource review #5: Koha Blog

Koha blog. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.myacpl.org/koha/.

From the same folks who brought you A Koha Diary is Koha Blog, a resource for modification and customization of the Koha interface. If I were managing a live Koha system, I would subscribe to this blog’s feed and read it every day. (Or, well, as often as it updates, which isn’t very often; it’s much more of an archive than a real day-to-day blog.)

The great thing about open source software like Koha is that, with the right application of effort, you can make it do whatever you want it to. And in the true spirit of open source, the folks at the Nelsonville Public Library are sharing their efforts with the rest of the library community, in simple, straightforward explanations that anyone with a minimum of programming experience can implement.

This kind of stuff (although possibly not these exact tweaks) is also available at the Koha developer’s wiki, but the advantage of Koha Blog is in its simplicity and in the fact that it’s written by librarians for librarians: knowing how to add extra content blocks is useful, but knowing what you’d use them for is even more useful, as in this example.