Koha: Pros and Cons
When I was a little girl, my parents would encourage me to make a long list of pros and cons prior to taking a decision. Now that I'm older (but certainly not yet grown up!) one of the most frequent questions I get about Koha from librarians is "Now really, Brooke, what's wrong with it?" There's a feeling that if it's free, it has to be inferior. This is closely related to Lies Your Vendor Tells You.
But there are issues, and I am in a unique position to genuinely assess the product over a long period of time as well as have an insider's view of some of what happens with the developers.
Cataloguing still stinks.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst part of Koha is the cataloguing module. It is clunky. The interface divides the tags into screens and it's tricky to get things the way that you want them. It's specific when it needs to be vague, standardised when it needs to be customised. Most of us are used to a blank laissez faire text box, and you are NOT going to get this with Koha. This is no doubt the worst part of having the product originate from a non Librarian, and in my mind it's the largest persistent problem. On the other hand, this is one of the things that makes the search Koha employs better. I have seen routine progress with cataloguing - specifically with standards. This progress has been nothing short of astounding. In the before time Koha had a bandaid to ensure it kinda sorta played nicely with MARC; Koha needed stitches. Years later, there are still sneaky yet clever tricks in play, for instance when it comes to additional authors things are not quite kosher yet. I blame myself heavily on this one - if I speced things out for the developers instead of keeping them in my head, I wouldn't have to mention this.
Bells and whistles sometimes overwhelm standby meat and potatoes features.
Since this started with computer folks, it is feature laden. This is a happy thing. You will come to love stuff you never thought an ILS would have. You will take for granted the spankingly cool 856u linkage right there in the information screen and the seamless quality it lends to webby content. You'll dig bookshelves full of favourite reserves teachers make year after year. But such seamless coolification will cause you to scratch your head and wonder why cataloguing still stinks. However, wading through those features is greatly preferable to the seemingly endless commercial chorus of "That can't be done." when the comment is connected to a feature WE KNOW someone else already has.
Being webbased means never having to pay for a Staff Computer
Any computer anywhere is your staff computer. As long as your IP cooperates, you can do administrative stuff from wherever you are. I added some of my Patron records from Seattle when the server was at home for testing. Any computer anywhere is also your OPAC provided you can get yerself a shiny static IP address.
Connection speed slower than the average geriatric patient? No problem!
I know this is hard to fathom, but think of a location even more rural than Western Massachusetts. Get your head around the concept of more sheep than people. More herd than humans means that the tick tick tick of an electric pasture fence causes interference in a plain old telephone line. Most remote systems failed in this hostile environment. This was one of the biggest problems that Chris Cormack needed to solve, and he did so brilliantly. Koha is so low demand on bandwidth that it will work reliably on dial up.
Patches and new features are sometimes entirely worked out but not released at large
I hate this. If I were just an average user, I would be blissful in my ignorance that the developers were already done some things and just literally hadn't copied them over to the main repository. However, since it's already done, if you can find it, you can use it ahead of time. Unfortunately, this sometimes means turning over rocks when you ought be dedicating that time to grants and other fun stuff.
Koha truly is a community - tech support is FAR superior to any commercial interaction you'll have
Folks write me an awful lot these days. Since I'm a giant geek, I love this. It's one big penpal bank for me. A couple of weeks ago, I was receiving queries entirely in French. There's an international flavour to things, which reinforces your current events, but more importantly means that just about 24/7, there's someone out there in cyberspace waiting to address your problem. Developers are invested in the product and we're getting to the point where the users themselves are starting to coalesce and really lend a hand. Small questions and problems can be worked out in shocking speed and there have been many occasions when I've put in a feature request and it's been seen to that day or even afternoon.
Innovation almost never takes a back seat; you just don't hear we can't too often
If you have a good idea, these developers will hear it out. This has meant that Koha has grown by leaps and bounds in a matter of years. Even when your idea is something that many Libraries have no current interest in using, since it's an open source project, you can tinker with the code yourself or there's always a coder waiting to do paid work.
When these guys say that they'll get round to it, they will
One of the biggest things I've had to drive home with practical, wonderful, cynical Librarians is that this lot truly is different. If a developer doesn't want to do something, or is placing your feature on the backburner, they'll say so. Those are terribly rare instances. More often than not, you'll hear "Oh, that's a good idea. I'll get on that in the next release." Generally when you hear this from the commercial ILS vendors, that means they've no intent of doing it and not charging you. When you hear it from the Koha community 1) They are actually putting it on the roadmap, which you can and should look at and 2) they'll say when they're going to charge you. It's that simple.
Diversification of reliable US support options
Right now, there's one sole large option for US support and that's LibLime. This situation is too new to appraise just yet, and I'm sure we'll get truth out of Nora. My father was an economics and business and marketing professor, so I'm very cynical when there's only one guy out there. There are a smattering of local little guys out there, but the pickings as yet are sparse. However, this is an international project, and frankly it doesn't matter where your data is as long as it's secure and accessible. So, if you're willing to look abroad or farther from home than usual, there are options other than LibLime.
Truly international
If you've got Patrons that speak different languages at your Library, Koha's your product. Those fields that you never thought you'd use in the MARC have been beaten into submission by Koha. So, you can do crazy things like switch your catalogue about to search and retrieve in all sorts of languages. The United Nations digs this, and I expect that Koha will slowly be accepted by more and more segments of the UN.
https://www.unido.org/cgi-bin/koha/about.pl
A side benefit is that you can work on those languages you were meant to pick up in seventh grade.
The Children's interface is wonderful
LibLime mocked up a funny catalogue in cooperation with Indexdata.