History of Koha

presented by Chris Cormack and Paul Poulain

Chris is one of the original developers of Koha in 1999. There was no suitable responses to the RFP as they needed an application that worked over slow connections. Using a web based application was a natural choice because it works well over slow connections. There was no open source solutions at the time and open source was a natural choice because neither HLT or Katipo wanted to be a vendor. Developed in rapid prototype with lots of refining.

It's just a database... but with lots and lots of rules.

History of Koha: http://stats.workbuffer.org/history.html

When they first released version 1.0 of Koha, the first copy was downloaded in 20 minutes. In 2002, Paul Poulain got involved and Owen Leonard from Nelsonville Public Library.

Chris soon realized that when working with libraries, standards meant "standards" and he often had to ask which MARC.

In 2003, the community continues to grow, more developers, more translations. NPL went live in 2003. The NZ prime minister mentioned Koha in a speech.

In 2004, the first koha docs were written at www.kohadocs.org and first time a non-technical person contributed to Koha.

In 2005, Liblime got on board with Koha to support U.S. libraries. Paul formed a partnership with Henri Damien Laurent to meet the demand for Koha support. Decided to go with Zebra for full-text searching. New www.koha.org site released.

In 2006, Chris presented about Koha at Linux Conference Australia and Linus was in the audience! First, KohaCon held in Paris.

In 2007, lots of talks with Liblime about hiring Chris and several others. Started Koha Days to fix features that no one was sponsoring, but needed to be done. Koha won a NZ Open Source Award, despite being in the same category with the guy that wrote Ruby on Rails.

In 2008, Nicole did huge amounts of work on the Koha 3.0 manual. Paul and Henri formed Biblibre. Chris left Liblime and now works for Catalyst, but is the translation manager. Chris says, "2008 should be called the year of India", as major libraries including Dehli Public Library switched to Koha and several major companies to support Koha.