One Big Library.

Joshua Ferraro, Debra Denault, and Chris Cormack (see two of their smiling faces here) of LibLime joined me to discuss their work at LibLime and on koha in particular. I've been watching koha for the better part of eight years, since it was first released (if you don't believe me, check here). That this "gift" has led to hundreds of implementations in many countries worldwide in 27 languages is a remarkable testament to the power of free/libre/open source software in libraries.

The most exciting thing to me is that they're growing a healthy company around the koha project and related services without sacrificing anything about what made this one of the first important library free software projects. It's just as available to everyone today as it was back in 2000 when they first started sharing it with all of us, and it's better than ever.

Listen in to hear this whole story, and in particular, to hear about the latest and greatest features coming in the soon-to-be-released koha 3.

Some things we mentioned included:

• Marshall Breeding's History of Library Automation, which stops at 2006 - LibLime, Index Data and Equinox don't even appear!
• translate.koha.org, the Koha Translation Manager, which is based on Kartouche.
• Version Control for Koha using Git, the koha documentation for using their git environment, which you can also browse right here.
• Wikipedia on electric fences. You'll have to listen to understand.

It's been a while since I've done one of these, so I'll apologize to Josh, Debra, and Chris and anyone listening for the audio being a bit uneven, and for the annoying echo you'll hear sometimes. I'll iron out the gear upgrades and things will sound better next time around.

Oh, one last thing - I've installed the encl_remote module for drupal which should allow me to *finally* link to the podcast audio directly from this blog with enclosure-style links. So if you're subscribed here, you should get the 'cast files, too! And the link to the audio file is just below these very words a few centimeters or so. Let me know if these work for you.