RELEASE NOTES FOR KOHA 17.05.00

29 May 2017

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world. The website for the Koha project is:

Koha 17.05.00 can be downloaded from:

Installation instructions can be found at:

Koha 17.05.00 is a major release, that comes with many new features.

It includes 7 new features, 197 enhancements, 292 bugfixes.

New features

Circulation

Add ability to place article requests in Koha. Article Requests are somewhat similar to holds, but are not requests for an item to check out. Instead, article requests are requests for a photocopy of a particular section of a book ( most often ). This is very common in academic libraries where researchers may request a copy of a single article found in a journal. This patch set adds the ability to place article requests in Koha. It allows the control of what can be requested via the circulation rules. Since article requests of electronic resources are not outside the realm of possibility, the feature will check not only the items for requstability, but the record itself as well ( i.e. both items.itype and biblio.itemtype ). Article requests can be placed for patrons from the opac and staff intranet and can be viewed in most areas where holds are viewed ( e.g. patron details, record details, etc ). There is a script to view article requests in progress within the circulation module. Article requests can be Open ( i.e. new ), In Processing, Completed, or Canceled. The status of a given request can be updated from this script.

Without this feature users could reserve items and choose any library as a pick up location, but there was no mechanism to prevent users from reserving items that were available on the shelf at any given location from reserving the item at the same location, essentially creating a Fetch and Collect scenario. This had an impact on staff workloads as they had to process reservations and check shelves for items that students could have collected from the open library shelves. This enhancement decreases the impact on staff workload by making it possible to prevent users from requesting items for pick up at a library where the item is currently available.

Installation and upgrade (web-based installer)

Koha now has a new tool to get Koha users up and running quickly after a new install. The user is prompted to create their first user, library, category code, item type, and circulation rule just after the database install has completed. Getting started with Koha has never been easier.

Notices

It's now possible to translate notice templates into different languages. There is a new 'preferred language' setting available in the user account, that controls which template will be used when generating notices.

OPAC

This feature adds a "Note" input field to checked out items in the "your summary" section of the patron account in the OPAC. The field allows patrons to write notes about the item, such as "this DVD is scratched", "the binding was torn", etc. The note will be emailed to the library and displayed on check in.

Patrons

This features adds the ability to create clubs which patrons may be enrolled in. It is particularly useful for tracking summer reading programs, book clubs and other such clubs.

System Administration

Hea is a service to collect usage data from libraries using Koha. With this development Hea can collect the geolocations of the libraries in your installation and create a map. A new configuration page allows to configure easily what information is shared with the Koha community. Hea statistics can been seen on https://hea.koha-community.org/

Enhancements

About

Acquisitions

This patch provides the functionality to hide inactive vendors from the vendor search.

This patch redirects to the vendor's list of baskets after deleting a basket, fixes breadcrumbs after deletion and also hides the toolbar actions after deletion (seeing as you can't edit/export etc a basket that no longer exists).

The goal of this development is to automatically generate items in Koha with populated information based on a 9XX field and subfield, with the new syspref MarcItemFieldsToOrder.

Authentication

This feature allows it to add new patron records from Shibboleth into Koha ('provision'). It is possible to map Sbibboleth's attributes with Koha fields, the configuration is done in koha-conf.xml. Syncing existing Koha users with Shibboleth is not implemented yet.

'Persona' never really took off, and although many browsers currently support it, very few services actually implement it. This has lead its founders, Mozilla, to end the project. On November 30th, 2016, Mozilla closed the persona.org services. Now the feature is deleted from Koha.

Cataloging

Circulation

Database

Hold requests

Installation and upgrade (command-line installer)

Label/patron card printing

Lists

MARC Authority data support

This enhancement replaces dontmerge by a limit. The Zebra code in merge is removed. The cron job has been refactored, and is no longer optional; it also supports merges from one authority type to another (with a table revision).

This patch adds a 008 cataloguing value builder for MARC21 classifications records (LCC, DDC/Dewey, UDC and so on). This is a starting point for supporting classification records in Koha.

MARC Bibliographic data support

MARC Bibliographic record staging/import

Notices

OPAC

This patch inserts a new system preference: "OpacNewsLibrarySelect". When it is active you can select to see the news of any library on the OPAC start page.

Packaging

Patrons

Reports

Bug 17196 moved the column marcxml out of the biblioitems table and into a separate one. That will break any SQL reports using marcxml, but in order to make it easy to fix them, a new column with a warning has been added to the Saved reports page (/reports/guided_reports.pl?phase=Use saved). There is also an update link that will help to modify the SQL query.

SIP2

Searching

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

This patch set adds: - a reference to Hea at the end of the installation process - a link to the new page from the admin home page - a new page to easily configure shared statistics

Templates

Test Suite

Tools

Web services

Critical bugs fixed

(this list includes all bugfixes since the previous major version. Most of them have already been fixed in maintainance releases)

Acquisitions

Architecture, internals, and plumbing

LDAP USER NOTICE: The option to integrate LDAP via "auth by password" has been removed. Please update your LDAP integration setting to use "auth by bind" instead.

Authentication

Cataloging

Circulation

In the previous versions if no circulation rule was defined, Koha always allowed to check out. Now, with this development, Koha refuses check-out if no rule is found.

Hold requests

I18N/L10N

Installation and upgrade (command-line installer)

Installation and upgrade (web-based installer)

Label/patron card printing

MARC Bibliographic record staging/import

Notices

OPAC

Patrons

SIP2

Searching

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

Templates

Test Suite

Tools

Web services

Z39.50 / SRU / OpenSearch Servers

Other bugs fixed

(this list includes all bugfixes since the previous major version. Most of them have already been fixed in maintainance releases)

About

Acquisitions

Cataloging

Circulation

Command-line Utilities

Course reserves

Database

Developer documentation

Documentation

Hold requests

Installation and upgrade (command-line installer)

Installation and upgrade (web-based installer)

Label/patron card printing

Lists

MARC Authority data support

MARC Bibliographic data support

Notices

OPAC

Packaging

Patrons

Reports

SIP2

Searching

Self checkout

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

Templates

Tools

Transaction logs

Web services

Z39.50 / SRU / OpenSearch Servers

Test Suite

Architecture, internals, and plumbing

The database column opac_news.new is renamed to opac_news.content. The notice templates using that placeholder should have been updated automatically (bug 18121).

The system preference 'OverdueNoticeBcc' is renamed to 'NoticeBcc' as it does not only apply to overdue notices, but to notices in general.

It's now possible to define multiple plugin directories in the Koha conf file. This allows for ease of plugin development so that each plugin installed can live in its own git repository. For compatibility, the first plugindir instance defined is used for uploading plugins via the web interface.

This development moves marcxml out of the biblioitems and deletedbiblioitems tables and moves it to two new tables: biblio_metadata and deletedbiblio_metadata. SQL queries using the biblioitems table but not the marcxml column will get a performance boost. Storing the marcxml in a specific table will allow us to store several metadata formats (USMARC, MARCXML, MIJ, etc.). ATTENTION: all reports that use ExtractValue to retrieve MARC tags from biblioitems.marcxml need to be updated/rewritten.

This patch set adds a new table authorised_value_categories to store authori(s|z)ed value categories into a separate table. The problematic is explained on bug 15799 comment 4: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15799#c4

New sysprefs

System requirements

Important notes:

Documentation

The Koha manual is maintained in DocBook.The home page for Koha documentation is

As of the date of these release notes, only the English version of the Koha manual is available:

The Git repository for the Koha manual can be found at

Partial translations are available for various other languages.

The Koha team welcomes additional translations; please see

for information about translating Koha, and join the koha-translate list to volunteer:

The most up-to-date translations can be found at:

Release Team

The release team for Koha 17.05.00 is

Credits

We thank the following libraries who are known to have sponsored new features in Koha 17.05.00:

We thank the following individuals who contributed patches to Koha 17.05.00.

We thank the following libraries, companies, and other institutions who contributed patches to Koha 17.05.00

We also especially thank the following individuals who tested patches for Koha.

We regret any omissions. If a contributor has been inadvertently missed, please send a patch against these release notes to koha-patches@lists.koha-community.org.

Thanks

Special thanks from the Release Manager

I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed time and effort to this release. Many hands make light work!

A special thanks to the ByWater Solutions team. I could not have done this without all of you! - Brendan Gallagher - Nathan Curulla - Joy Nelson - Melissa Lefebvre - Jesse Maseto - Jacqueline Salter - Barton Chittenden - Nick Clemens - Michael Cabus - Jessie Zairo - Karen Holt - Kelly McElligott - Larry Baerveldt - Danielle Elder - Rocio Dressler - Jessica Beno - Todd Goatley - Josh Barron - Adam Brooks - Cindy Norman

Revision control notes

The Koha project uses Git for version control. The current development version of Koha can be retrieved by checking out the master branch of:

The branch for this version of Koha and future bugfixes in this release line is 17.05.x

Bugs and feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed at the Koha bug tracker at:

He rau ringa e oti ai. (Many hands finish the work)

Autogenerated release notes updated last on 29 May 2017 23:12:14.