Library Technology Guides

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Statistical Report for Koha

1 Responses for Koha in 2016

3 Responses for Koha in 2015

4 Responses for Koha in 2014







0 Responses for Koha in 2012







0 Responses for Koha in 2010

0 Responses for Koha in 2009

1 Responses for Koha in 2008

2022 : gen: 7.84 company 7.97 loyalty 7.85 support 7.98

2021 : gen: 7.85 company 7.99 loyalty 7.88 support 7.95

2020 : gen: 7.83 company 7.83 loyalty 7.61 support 7.89

2019 : gen: 7.65 company 7.77 loyalty 7.14 support 7.67

2018 : gen: 7.67 company 7.78 loyalty 7.49 support 7.73

2017 : gen: 7.49 company 7.59 loyalty 6.99 support 7.52

2013 : gen: 7.47 company 7.52 loyalty 7.12 support 7.41

2011 : gen: 7.06 company 6.90 loyalty 6.65 support 6.79

2007 : gen: 7.21 company 7.48 loyalty 6.71 support 6.82

Comments

to add harvesting of data as a first step (Type: Academic)

Great open source product for our series of small, networked, special libraries on tight budgets. Management vendor is proactive, helpful and easy-going, which makes life for those of us who are a little less tech savvy so much easier! (Type: Medical)

Koha est utilisé avec un webservice vers la base de connaissance Mirabel pour les informations sur les revues électroniques (accès au texte intégral) (Type: School)

Although our migration has been less than smooth; indeed, it is infested with bugs, we still do not regret moving to Koha and leaving Horizon. (Type: Public)

I believe that because the open source company we selected after a rigorous RFP process that because the ILS company had 68 new customers the support was stretched too thin. The company could not grow fast enough to accommodate. (Type: Academic)

Until we get high speed broadband, any web-based systems are not going to perform as well as proprietary programs installed on a local server. (Type: Public)

We have only been using Koha for less than a month so other than commenting on Bywater support these questions are hard for me to answer. I will have more experience with the ILS in next year's survey. (Type: Public)

I feel that the KOHA ILS still lacks some basic functionality in terms of patron interface and staff functionality, specifically the accounting module/charging patrons for lost books and creating financial reports. My patrons and I both find the patron interface difficult to use and understand. This has gotten better over the 6 years we've used KOHA but I still believe this lack of intuitive design is a barrier for most patrons. I am very happy with Bywater's migration services and would be happy to recommend them to others. (Type: Public)

In response to the question, Where does the library direct most of its ILS support issues?, I chose ILS vendor even thought I don't consider Bywater Solutions the vendor for Koha. But they are our ILS support company, so I thought that was the closest correct answer to the question. (Type: Academic)

We have been very pleased with Koha as implemented and supported by ByWater Solutions. However, it only houses our print book collection, not our digital resources. We use our website and a CMS (Expression Engine) to manage those. (Type: Special)

We have been using Koha from Bywater. The last "upgrade" not only did not improve things that we heard were going to be better, but broke the system so that it is much less useful. While I loved the idea of "open source", in fact we are paying a lot for a marginally useful system. In particular, none of our Overdrive titles show up in the catalog, we have constant problems with checkins, overdues no longer show in red, and when we are checking out, new checkouts show at the bottom of the list, so that it is hard to know which have actually gone through. The servers are very slow, and we have had several occasions when they do not work at all. (Type: Public)

We are migrating in December 2014 to Apollo. These answers are in relation to our installation of Koha as supported by ByWater. (Type: Public)

There have been bugs with each upgrade of our open sources software but they get resolved right away. (Type: Public)

Koha is an excellent product. 1/3 of the cost for maintenence than other ILS support vendors. Customization, Support, and product far superior to any ILSes we have used in the past. I highly recomment Koha supported by ByWater for any library thinking of migrating from another vendor! (Type: Public)

We already have an open source ILS Koha, hosted by Bywater Solutions and have been very pleased with the system, migration, and customer support (Type: Academic)

Koha is growing very rapidly in features. This is causing some problems with how well the features are working. Our vendor, ByWater Solutions is increasing it's customer base so much that they have a hard time giving the level of customer service we have come to expect. (Type: Public)

I am a new director and some of the answers may be wrong in the interpretation of the question. (Type: Public)

Koha is an open sourse ILS (Type: Public)

Overall -- very satisfied with both the software and the support vendor. (Type: Public)

We use Bywater Solutions Koha. It works very well. Though without our own programmers it sometimes can seem like working with a typical vendor. (Type: Public)

[...] (Type: Public)

Koha is an Open Source ILS. (Type: Public)

The Koha ILS is great. Its interface presents a very easy learning curve for anyone familiar with using popular websites such as google, amazon, ebay, etc. It being open source means that the community can customize it, and we have benefited from this. I can't imagine us moving to another ILS. As far as our vendor, ByWater Solutions, they are great. Their service request system is simple to use. They respond to issues quickly. An added bonus, is that they have Nicole Engard on staff, the writer of the Koha manual. I can't stress enough how confidence inspiring it is to me to have some of my support issues handled by her. (Type: Public)

Koha is a constantly evolving organism. Improvements are being made all the time. The community really does respond to the needs of its constituency. With that being said, there is still a long ways to go until Koha is an equal with the likes of Innovative Interfaces. But then, you get what you pay for, and Koha through ByWater is the right amount of "Bang for the buck" for us. ...and things keep getting better and more robust. ByWater does a great job for us and I hope they keep it up. I also hope that some of the cataloging functionality in Koha will soon be improved so I can better manage our e-resources (batch deletions and edits specifically) [I've heard rumors that something might be in the works.] (Type: Academic)

We recently switched to Koha by ByWater Systems and we've been very pleased with the process. Their tech support has responded to our questions quickly. (Type: Academic)

Customer service has always been prompt and courteous. The question regarding whether it has gotten better or worse was hard to answer, because the customer service has been great since we first contracted with Bywater. (Type: Public)

Bywater Solutions have done a great job in transferring us from Athena to Koha during July-August, 2014, and we are very satisfied with their maintenance of our system on their servers as well as their swift, efficient responses to our many queries since we "went live" with Koha on August 25. (Type: Public)

ByWater Solutions has great customer support. (Type: Medical)

So far, so good. I have just released it to the staff (users) and they seem happy with it. (Type: Corporate)

We are using Koha ILS that is designed for use with multiple branches, not independent members of a consortium. The functionality far, far surpasses anything Follett (prior vendor) has ever offered and improvements are constantly being made. However, sometimes upgrades introduce new bugs and that can be very frustrating. Also, this "group" Koha system can be very difficult for circ desk staff/volunteers that are not very tech savvy. It has been my observation that Bywater responds quickly to any problem that can be addressed. (Type: Public)

Koha is okay from the opac side although the default display is weirdly bad (eg. do I really need to ask for subfields to be displayed for X00 tags?) and the search engine is extremely poor. On the cataloging side, it is a huge pain to work with. (Type: Theology)

Koha's reporting is awful. Difficult to use and not efficient. Since last update, it is very slow. (Type: Academic)

Cataloging new materials with this system can be tricky. For example, the format types displayed on the front end do not match the options available on the back end's cataloging tool -- and the back end only offers four options (books, CD-ROMs, continuing resources, and web resources). This has made it difficult to catalog DVDs. (Type: Academic)

The biggest challenge with the Koha ILS is the functionality of the acquisitions module. Luckily, ByWater is supportive and help us work through the glitches there. In terms of electronic resource management Koha doesn't provide that. We use EBSCO's ERM product for managing those resources. (Type: Academic)

I recommend ByWater Solutions to any library that is considering a hosted Koha implementation. Their customer service and dedication to the development of the ILS is really top-notch, and they definitely care about their customers' wants, needs and feedback about Koha. (Type: Medical)

Just migrated to [...] Koha [...] in September 2014 - They upgraded the system in October 2014. (Type: Public)

Switching to open source community Koha from the proprietary PTFS/Liblime koha-based ILS was a great improvement. The migration through Bywater Solutions went quite smoothly. Because of our terrible experience with the Liblime product, we would have switched to a commercial ILS if our library could have afforded to do so. Open-source Koha works much better than our previous system, but it lacks some of the features and search precision which is available in most traditional ILS systems. (Type: Academic)

Koha is a good ILS, but the search functionality is not up to our needs. We know that at some point int he not too distant future Zebra will be replaced with Elastic Search, and we are looking forward to this. For a special research library, the current search functionality is frustrating. As to service, during our migration I was concerned ByWater might be overextended. They insisted they are not. We did not get good timely responses to our inquiries. This is an oddball library, and ByWater's "trust us - we know how to do this, so do it our way" approach didn't work well for us. We needed a different process, and we could not get it. I discussed this at length after migration with ByWater, and I think they understood my complaints and took them to heart. Didn't help us, of course, but I hope it helps someone else. (Type: Museum)

Bywater Solutions has lagged the last year in addressing development requests. We had 2 that were in hiatus for a year. But I did not follow up or push the issue forward once the request was submitted. (Type: Consortium)

Koha is an excellent ILS for a library of this size, but it would be helpful if we had a dedicated tech person who could work more closely with ByWater to fix bugs, etc. when they come up. I think that there's a language gap between programmers and non-programmers, and we don't always communicate very effectively. The everyday functioning of the ILS is wonderful (if slow). Trying to make changes is where I run into trouble. It can be difficult to figure out how to do things in Koha on your own and it can be difficult to find help with the little things that come up. For example, I was trying to add authorized values to the Location field and it took me the better part of a day to figure out how to do it or where to look for help on how to do it. (Type: Public)

[...] Our support vendor is Bywater and they are excellent. (Type: Public)

System is JUST being implemented and has not yet been used "live." (Type: Academic)

Though Catalyst is very fast in responding to service requests and their customer service is fantastic, we have found their prices high and we have to pay for requests we expect would be covered by our standard service level agreement. (Type: Special)

Koha has been the most painless/seamless LMS that I have used, over the last 35 years. (Type: Public)

Koha open source product is stable, with annual updates, and provides more functionality than we need, especially OPAC integration of other resources. Equinox support and hosting is reliable, professional and prompt. (Type: Public)

For question 3, we do not use the ILS to its fullest due to lack of staff time to adopt new methods. For question 4, we have OverDrive connected through our catalogue, but we have not tried to implement other resources. I put a 5 because it is fairly effective for its purposes of ebooks, but that is where we have stopped exploring. Hmm articles etc could be interesting to get through there, but I don't know that something like summon would actually be effective because I don't know that people often want that much information. At UWO, Summon was implemented and even students looking for books and articles were inundated and completely overwhelmed. Also, we contact other libraries vs our vendor simply because we have not had many big issues. They have all been minor "How do you do this" questions. Only once have we had to contact the vendor and the issue was fixed within about 10 minutes. (Type: Public)

Estamos en fase inicial de la catalogación en koha, abordando por el momento solamente LIBROS en papel, Además de Scire trabajamos con otras dos empresas: Conocimiento Práctico, como intermediario-mediador y con [...] , para la catalogación (Type: Special)

We did not use a vendor for our ILS. We installed it ourselves with the help of a knowledgeable volunteer. (Type: Public)

Some questions cannot be appropriate to our situation, since we manage the Koha installation only with internal HR, without the help of any vendor. (Type: Academic)

Please note that the library is using a self-hosted version of an open-source ILMS and therefore the questions relating to vendor and support are not applicable. (Type: Art)

Since I installed Koha by myself with advice from the Koha discussion list, some of the questions don't apply. I have also modified Koha's templates to use it as a local authors catalog using Medline records. MAC-MLA thought this was sufficiently interesting to accept my poster presentation at their 2014 meeting. I find Koha easy to use, easy to set up, and easy to run. (Type: Medical)

Our system has not been upgraded appropriately, and now, our local holdings information is extremely difficult to update or migrate. We are working on having Koha 3.14 or better up and running for Fall 2015. (Type: Academic)

software muy robusto (Type: School)

I skipped a lot of questions because we use an open-source ILS (Koha) that is managed in-house. (We purchased our server, but I set up the ILS and I am "customer support.") We also don't use our ILS to manage electronic resources at this time. (Type: School)

Many of the above questions were not applicable as we are currently using an open source ILS, Koha. The Library Director and the Systems Network Consultant for the [...] completed the conversion and provide most of the support for the ILS. We also access the Koha community for resources. (Type: Public)

The Koha open source community continues to impress. We are very please with our ILS and have no plans to look elsewhere. (Type: School)

We manage the open source Koha system by ourselves. [...] Support comes from the Koha developers community. (Type: Museum)

[...] has it's own IT team support for providing system implementation support to software issue handling as well as research on newer technologies. So, technically we never provisioned any third party for implementing the software rather we simply acquired the source codes from the respective websites and did the rest on our own. (Type: Academic)

All development, maintenance etc is conducted "in-house" -- no outside contractors/vendors have ever been used. (Type: Special)

Our technical support found that open source software requires more input than the School's budget allows for, so problems are not speedily fixed. I, on the other hand love Koha, but if we changed it would not be to another open source product. (Type: School)

We have just implemented KOHA from CDS/ISIS by converting data through MARC EDIT and also support from the KOAH Community. (Type: Special)

We have recently migrated and we are still adapting. (Type: Public)

We implemented Koha ourselves without a vendor, and with some wonderful assistance on the part of other Koha users who answered questions and helped us troubleshoot. (Type: Special)

Some items were left blank because our library is already using Koha, an open source ILS that we maintain internally. Libraries are in the forefront of change. Financial, organizational, service delivery, product management, and client interaction. Changes are happening radically and frequently that buying a typical OTS ILS is no longer practical. (Type: National)

I believe KOHA has the ability to meet our needs very well, but our IT person has installed it and does the work on it. For some reason he has not been able to get KOHA to automatically re-index, so at times we have 6 months of new materials that do not show up when they are searched for. (Type: Academic)

The [...] Library already uses Koha which is an open source Library system (Type: Special)

Actualmente ya no se utiliza este sistema de gestión en los [...]. (Type: Government Agency)

Nuestro SIGB es de código abierto y el soporte se ofrece a través de un foro electrónico sobre bibliotecas y documentación en el que intervienen otras bibliotecas y los responsables del proyecto Koha-Kobli del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte de España. (Type: Public)

One of the best things about the ILS we use is the fact that it is administered by a library consortium as opposed to a for-profit vendor. In my opinion, librarians need to do more to take control of the products needed to provide service to our communities. In a profit environment we end up with expensive, less than desirable products such as Overdrive. (Type: Public)

LibLime Academic Koha is the version of Koha we use from LibLime. I mention this because there are at least two different versions of Koha that LibLime supports. (Type: Academic)

I love our ILS, branded [..] , administered by [...] in [...] . The only aspect that needs improvement is the functionality of the the reports for staff. (Type: Public)

[...] There are things I miss about Horizon but you can't beat the Koha's price. (Type: Public)

Our ILS is open source! (Type: Public)

Our school has two physical libraries and an archive. The Koha ILS allows us to have three "locations" that can transfer items and manage hold request between the three locations. (Type: School)

[...] ISD is a poor school district and could not afford anything but open source circ/cat. KOHA has proved to be a good match with our library. User friendly and cataloging is easy to perform. We use LibLime for support after several years of problems with support. They respond in a timely manner and contacting them is easy. (Type: School)

[...] is what we call the Union Catalog that the [...] maintains. There has been a lot of growth over the past 2 years and the number of libraries using [...] has doubled (currently 71 libraries). We expect to add as many as 50 libraries in 2015. PTFS has been fantastic in meeting our day to day needs as well as handling a massive amount of migrations. Open source as a platform is perfect for our consortia because there are all types of libraries represented and we require a dynamic platform that legacy ILS vendors can't provide and are not affordable. (Type: Consortium)

[...] (Type: Academic)

[...] In our consortium there are stark differences in opinion between the people who use the system every day all day and the consortium managers that have direct contact with Lib-lime. It is hard to find a fan of Lib-lime Koha at the librarian level. Lib-lime Koha is slow, our database implementation extremely inefficient, development is virtually nonexistent, and the patron experience is horrible. I hear complaints every day. (Type: Public)

Koha works fine for our small public library. PTFS/Liblime support isn't much better than adequate but again, its fine for our small public library. Although I haven't given any high marks to our vendor or the ILS itself, I in no way see us ever going back to one of the traditional ILS vendors nor do I see us switching to one of the other companies that supports open source. (Type: Public)

A few small issues aside, Koha (hosted) works well for a small library. However, one aspect of the ILS that needs improvement is its bare-bones inventory tools. (Type: Academic)

[...] migrated to Koha in mid-November, so our experience is still fresh, and we are still learning about all the functionality the system. We believe that being part of a consortium with over one million items is a boon to our patrons. (Type: Public)

There were two major upgrades to the LibLime Koha software. One made improvements to the acquisitions module. The other made a major overhaul to the financial piece of LibLime Koha. LibLime has also been working on a discovery layer for the academic version of LibLime Koha which we should have access to in 2015. This should provide improved access to digital resources. (Type: Consortium)

We are very happy with Koha and our Vendor. [...] has been very busy this year with Oslo though so we had to develop some patches with other companies for 2014. Hence a slightly lower satisfaction with our vendor - we love having Oslo as a fellow Koha library but is has made it harder for our vendor to allocate the time we would have wanted to our needs. (Type: Public)

We create patches for the functionality we are lacking. The thing we are missing is mostly connections to specific Swedish services. Our support vendor is great but have been quite busy with Oslo this year and therefore we are using some additional vendors for development this year. We have no e-resources. (Type: Public)

We have yet to organise our e resources - whih are not at present a large part of our collection in any case - hence the neutral response (Type: Museum)

Fairly happy with supplier although their pricing structure is not very transparent and seems to be one set price despite size of library. (Type: Medical)

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Library Technology Guides is a service provided by Marshall Breeding, independent consultant, author, and speaker.