Koha Live Catalogues from Pune

British Council - http://www.library.britishcouncil.org.in/

Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir - http://www.punenagarvachan.org

LibliveDVD small correction

Realized that new liblivedvd-ver 1.5 does not search non-latin characters properly. Had forgotten to made following changes while compiling liblivedvd. The following commands added by Vimal Kumar may be of help to correct the issue if non-latin searches if are not working properly.

http://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2013-October/037509.html

Koha upgrade from 3.10 to 3.18

I helped one of the library to upgrade their koha from 3.10 to 3.18. Initially I tried direct upgrade from 3.10 to 3.18 but when data was imported all bibliographic records were visible but items were blank. At the same time they had also added their OPAC pages which was added in live.iso this was a major issue. If any xyz library downloads this iso the OPAC pages of X library are also installed when Y library installs this iso. For the library community who does not know anything abot technology it is such as difficult task to remove all OPAC related pages which are visible from X library when they install their distributed iso.

While converting their data from 3.10 to 3.18 i tried to import that data from 3.10 to 3.12, 3.12 to 3.14 then 3.14 to 3.16 then from 3.16 to 3.18 and then everything was alright.

While going from 3.14 to 3.16 it threw error of table roadtype not available. When the following command was run in mysql it upgraded successfully.

mysql>use koha_library;

mysql>CREATE TABLE `roadtype` ( `roadtypeid` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `road_type` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '', PRIMARY KEY (`roadtypeid`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

mysql>\q

The above command in mysql helped to upgrade from 3.14 to 3.16. Then after 3.16 to 3.18 upgrade was smooth.

Politics at workplaces

People are talking about development in India. Unless mindset of government officers change is there any way development can happen. Those who really want to contribute and do some good work they are tagged with several terms "aggressive, dominating, bypass higher authorities etc." but nobody looks at ground work and real interest people have in doing things.

New LibLiveCD on Ubuntu 14.04.1

Created a virtualmachine of ubuntu 14.04.1-i386 and started building koha, dspace and drupal. Initially tried koha and after successful configuration of koha started building dspace and drupal. Whole day was spent on trying first koha then testing livecd and then trying dspace and drupal. Hope this version of iso gets built successfully.

Personal Librarian

Came across following post of "Personal Librarian" Found interesting.


In India many of the library professionals are busy in buying only books and journals and carrying out routine works.  We really need to go beyond and think and introduce new services to our users.

"Personal Librarian program includes contacting each freshman with a personal librarian letter or postcard. Other efforts over the years have included providing exam snacks or end-of-the-semester cookies, chair massages in the library during exams, “Ask a Librarian” posters that feature students with an ASK sign, mouse pads that encourage students to contact a librarian, digital flyers on large-screen computers around campus, collaborative programming with other events and departments on campus, and ongoing library workshops each semester".
( http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/v57_n3/dillon.html )

DSpace - 4.1 Learning on Virtual Player

Installed dspace 4.1 on ubuntu 12.04 LTS and trying to see new features.

1. DSpace 4.1 now allow to restrict access to metadata, items, bitstreams to group of people so that it can only show names of the collection but wont show further details. It looks properly in Xmlui but was not proper in jspui.