Speakers
Judith Gust - Auckland University of Technology
Abstract
AUT moved from III’s Sierra library management system to Koha during the latter half of 2021. Since that time, both during the implementation project and over the last 3 years of working in Koha Acquisitions, we have had many successful outcomes and some unexpected wins.
There was some initial doubt whether any Acquisitions data would be able to be migrated to Koha. The Acquisitions and Serials modules were seen as more ‘fiddly’ and a bit of an unknown quantity compared with areas such as Circulation and Cataloguing. However, all of AUT’s Acquisitions data – order, invoice and vendor records and 5 years’ worth of subscriptions payments - was successfully migrated from Sierra. All of the extremely valuable and detailed information we had recorded (including everything in free text notes fields), was retained in the new system. A major win!
Koha Acquisitions appeared to be more geared towards monograph and print purchasing, and with a large number of e-resource subscriptions to manage, we were also slightly dubious about how we would work with these in the new environment. Koha proved to have advantages in some respects which better suited the particular requirements we had, and more flexibility. We now have a workflow that allows us to record and manage our subscription-based electronic resource purchasing very effectively.
We also worked with Catalyst staff in 2024 to solve an issue where bibliographic records were being deleted, breaking the link between these records and the orders and invoices in Koha Acquisitions. Catalyst staff were able to create a fix that now allows us to re-link bibliographic records to orders and invoices where a record has been deleted. This has been a major win for us and shows the benefit of the open-source environment and close collaboration between Koha users and our IT support partner.
Speaker Biography
Judith Gust is currently Resources & Licensing Librarian at Te Mātāpuna Library & Learning Services, Auckland University of Technology. She joined AUT in October 2015 after more than 20 years spent working in public libraries in Auckland, mainly in Acquisitions and Serials roles. She was part of the Smarter Systems project in 2005 which saw 5 of Auckland’s local authority libraries moving to a shared regional computer system, and was also involved in the Auckland Council amalgamation in 2010, working with colleagues across the region as the new region-wide library system came into being. In 2021 she was part of the AUT team which successfully implemented Koha.