Joshua Ferraro

If you’ve been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems in terms of scalability, stability, and features, this article is for you. We’re going to take a whirlwind tour of Koha 2.4, focusing on a sneak preview of Koha’s latest feature: the ZOOM Plugin. Koha’s ZOOM support is implemented with Zebra (http://indexdata.dk/zebra), a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Zebra catapults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards-compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. Koha 2.4 is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.

A bit of history

Since it was first put into production in early 2000, Koha has enabled new realities of open access, affordability, and free innovation for hundreds of small and medium-sized libraries around the world. Koha has lived up to its name, which means ‘Gift’ in the Maori language of New Zealand. From the outset, many libraries understood the power of this gift. They downloaded it, they installed it, they changed it, and they contributed their solutions back to the library community.

For the 2.0 release of Koha, the Nelsonville Public Library (NPL) sponsored MARC support and a Z39.50 Server, which enabled them to use it county-wide in their eight-branch library system as well as to participate in statewide resource sharing with M.O.R.E. In January of 2005, Koha 2.2 was released and included serials management, an integrated help menu, and a new Koha theme based on NPL’s customized interface.

With a web-based interface, great self-service tools, support for important library standards like MARC and Z39.50, and lots of cool extras like enhanced content from Amazon.com, Koha is just what the doctor ordered. It’s perfect for libraries looking to upgrade their legacy systems on a tight budget, or simply desiring control over the direction of their software investments. And with commercial support available around the world, there are no barriers to implementation even for libraries without any in-house technology staff.

Evolution

In late 2005, the Koha development team, consisting of software engineers and techno-librarians around the world, began planning the next big step in Koha’s evolution. Their goal? To overhaul Koha’s back-end database and provide better MARC support, access to Dublin Core and MODS records, and overcome scalability limitations that made Koha 2.2 unfeasable for very large collections. After extensive evaluations of the best of the open-source textual database engines–including MySQL full-text, PostgreSQL tsearch2, Lucene and Plucene–the team selected Zebra, an open-source high-performance indexing and retrieval engine created and maintained by Index Data (http://indexdata.dk).

Zebra reads structured records in practically any input format (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries. It supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records) as well as incremental, safe database updates on live systems. Early performance tests showed search results in under a second for databases with over 5 million records on a modest i386 900Mhz server. Zebra also has excellent support for the Z39.50 protocol and opens the door to federated searching and portal management. All this means that Zebra was exactly what the Koha team was looking for.

Investing in their future

Deciding to integrate Zebra was an important step, but equally important was securing sponsorship to ensure that the project would succeed. As with all open-source projects, the value of sponsored development is in quality assurance. Purchasing development services guarantees that adequate time and resources are allocated to creating a production-ready product.

Enter Crawford County Federated Library System (CCFLS). The nine-library system in PA, USA was already a leader in open source, using thin clients, based on the LTSP, and filtering based on Squidguard and DansGuardian (see http://meadvillelibrary.org/os/ for more details) throughout their libraries. CCFLS decided to give back to the open-source community by sponsoring Koha’s Zebra integration. Though CCFLS already has a capable technical staff, and could support Koha in-house, they turned to LibLime for this development project. In August of 2005, they signed a contract with LibLime and development began immediately. The first milestone in Zebra integration is now complete with the completion of the ZOOM Plugin for Koha.

Future directions

Active development on Koha continues and Zebra is playing an important role. In addition to its virtually unparalleled MARC support, Zebra will allow Koha to store any structured record format (email, XML, Dublin Core) opening new horizons for special collections. The underlying ZOOM framework also provides the core requirements for a federated searching module.

The integration of Koha and Zebra is yet another success story demonstrating the power of open-source software collaboration. Koha libraries, like Crawford County and Nelsonville are coordinating their efforts and pooling resources to reach their technology goals. If you’re looking to take control of your ILS, there’s never been a better time.

About the Author

Joshua Ferraro currently serves as official Release Manager for the Koha project. He is also LibLime's President, Technology. He has over eight years of experience working with open-source technology. Over the past six years he has worked to promote open source in libraries. His library-related research interests include cross-database searching, integrated library automation systems, data mining and web spidering.