Status of Development for Koha 3.2

presented by Galen Charlton

Goals for Koha 3.2 (an ambitious release)

• New acquisitions module
• Holdings support
  
• Many circulation improvements - allowing to configure the circulation rules to the nth degree
  
• Improving stability

RFCs - A statement of saying we want this bit of functionality or we (programmer,library, vendor) are going to implement this function for the next version of Koha. Sometimes the RFCs are wouldn't it be nice.

Not all RFCs will be implemented for 3.2. Some were just proposals, and others didn't end up being sponsored.

New acquisitions module

• Developed by BibLibre
• In production with one of their customers
• Working on submitting their patches for 3.2
• Review and testing period

Holdings structure

• Developed by LibLime, sponsored by WALDO
  
• Introduces "summary" records to Koha
• Entering testing by WALDO
• You will be able to load them and export then and in theory you can pretend that the 852 tag doesn't exist.
  

WALDO circulation features

• Proxy patrons
• Fines thresholds
• Callslips, similar to request system
  
• Recalls, if someone has an item on loan and a faculty member has it the recall will say return it at once
  
• Hourly loans, meant to support having an item checked out for hours instead of days
  
• Email checkout slips
  

Other circulation features

• Calculate fines in days debarred, developed by BibLibre for 3.0 and will makes it way to 3.2 soon
• Placing hold on multiple items, introduced by Alloy Computing (yay HCL and Alloy Computing)
• Additional hold request improvements sponsored by NEKLS
• Course reserves

OPAC enhancements

• Support for enhanced content providers, Syndetics, LibraryThing, Babeltheque
• Tag multiple items (yay HCL and Alloy Computing)

Cataloging

• biblios.net marc record editor integration
• Improved browse indexes
• ISBN13 normalization (sponsored by PISD) - meaning if you only have 10 digit isbn it will compute isbn13 and visa versa
  
• Item bulk status change, BibLibre working on this and Liblime also working on a global change
• Brief records
• Record maintenance
• Deleted records - ability to still be able to search for deleted items and bibs in a specific context

Serials (for a non-library person like myself, what are Serials?)

• General improvements to serials display and predication pattern management
• More control over display of recently checked in issues (WALDO)

Administration

• Improved system preference editor (Jesse Weaver, developer at small library)

Reporting

• Improvements to the guided reports, mainly the ability to add placeholder mechanism. It will let you put in a parameter at the time of running the report instead of having to edit the SQL everytime.

Miscellaneous

• Granular permissions (new acquisitions module already implements some of these)
• Internet Explorer compatibility improvements (WALDO)
• Improvements to overdue report (PISD)
• Improved OAI-PMH server (Tamil)
• URL checker (Tamil)

Galen, "There will be at least one cool new thing coming from the KohaCon development meeting this weekend"

Timeline
Not something that is finalized. The currently goal for 3.2 will likely be late summer or early autumn. 3.1 release for testing in early summer.

The tip of the Koha bleeding edge is always and odd release number following the Linux kernel version numbering system.