Dear Koha community,

We are proud to announce the completion of the program to migrate existing libraries at the National University of Córdoba (UNC) to MARC and Koha.

It has been a long way to this end and we want to share with you part our experience, but since this is a newsletter we'll try to summarize.

By 2007, a new elected government took charge of the university and stimulated a renewed discussion on the community of librarians on the need of a unified software framework. The discussion took a long time in which some proprietary solutions were considered but many thought that we needed to try an open source solution to evade being vendor-locked.

To test the viability of a Koha based solution, at the beginning of 2008 the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy (FaMAF) appointed a librarian and two IT staff to begin the migration of their own library, whose staff volunteered to the task. This team needed to learn and master the installation process and the migration of data. In this case was installed Koha 3.0beta1, and the original data was on CDS/ISIS.

By June 2008 this library was fully functional and by September 2008 it was presented to the librarians and authorities on a workshop. The event helped to show the ease of use and a wide range of functionalities of the new Koha 3.0 (stable by that time), with the testimony of the librarians and users of the test install.

This success story set the decision of the University to begin a full scale migration and training process. The whole process was estimated in 1 and a half year. The original team was hired by the University with the addition of another librarian. Also, the University appointed one IT staff for support and installation issues.

By November 2008, having worked out the order of installations, the process began.

By late April 2010, the team reached its goal: all the proposed libraries were migrated and functional.

To put it in numbers:

• 23 libraries migrated
• 100+ CDS/ISIS databases migrated to MARC
• 3 SQL/xBase custom book databases migrated to MARC
• 2 Koha 2.2.x to Koha 3 migrations
• 360,000+ bibliographic records imported to Koha
• 150,000+ authority records imported to Koha
• 48,000+ user data migrated to Koha
• 100+ librarians trained
• 5 people migration and support team

We have also organized our first librarian workshop to discuss and share their experiences, and have set a very active internal mailing list for our librarians.

On the software side we run our instances on Ubuntu. Mostly Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and a few Ubuntu 9.10. Our install base runs Koha 3.0.3 with a few exceptions running Koha 3.1.x series.

Right now we are doing extensive (and successful) testing on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Koha 3.0.5. We aim to unify our install base soon.

On the hardware side we have a rich fauna including (mostly) Xen VirtualMachines on OpenSuse, VirtualBox VirtualMachines on Debian and Solaris, and a few dedicated boxes. We made little adaptations on the codebase because our main effort was on the migration to MARC and always wanted to be on the official trunk.

We only added an extra screen for managing debars, because we don't charge for late returns, and a few custom reports that include fancy graphics. We participate actively on the translation side, a must for our project, doing also the translation of bibliographic and authorities frameworks. It has been a great experience for us all, librarians, patrons, migration and support teams, with ups and downs, crash recovery solutions tested the hard way, but fundamentally showing that an OpenSource solution could work fine.

And all of this was possible because of you, the Koha community and the great developers behind it.

To the Koha Community, our respectfully thanks.

UNC Koha Migration & Support Team