The Catalyst Koha team is delighted to join the Koha community in celebrating the release of Koha 23.05. This release contains 26 new features, 145 enhancements and 701 bug and security fixes.
Every six months the Koha community does a major release, such as Koha 23.05. Major releases are when most new features and enhancements are added to Koha, so it’s always interesting to see what’s going to be available to libraries in their next upgrade.
The Catalyst Koha team has highlighted some of the new functionality and fixes available to libraries upon upgrading to Koha 23.05.
For the full Koha release notes see https://koha-community.org/koha-23-05-released/
If you would like to check out the new version as you read along, see https://demo.mykoha.co.nz/
Acquisitions
Receiving multiple order lines at once [8179]
When receiving basket orders from vendors, Koha libraries now have the ability to select and process multiple at once.
Selected orders can be browsed using the added 'Next order' and 'Previous order' buttons.
After editing each order, without reloading the page or having to search for them again, a convenient 'Confirm' button allows us to receive all orders at once.
This opens the door for new enhancements like adding default actions on all selected orders and more.
Revert suggestion status to ‘Accepted’ when orders made from a suggestion are cancelled [33098]
This enhancement was sponsored by Waikato Institute of Technology. When a library user makes a suggestion for the library to purchase, the status of the suggestion may be changed to ‘ORDERED’ once an order is placed for that item.
With this enhancement, cancelling an order will automatically change the status of the suggestion back to ‘ACCEPTED’ from ‘ORDERED’.
Cataloguing
Add a simple way to add ‘Harmful content warnings’ to catalogue records [31123]
This new feature allows librarians to pick a note field to use to store 'Content warnings' about bibliographic records.
The feature depends on the new `ContentWarningField` system preference to be set to a MARC field. For Koha libraries using MARC21, it is recommended to use a 59x field.
Strip leading/trailing whitespace characters from input fields when cataloguing [30358]
This is a feature that may be of interest to those who use Koha with a special interest in cataloguing. Sponsored by Educational Services Australia SCIS, this feature adds a new system preference `StripWhitespaceChars` which, when enabled, will strip leading and trailing whitespace characters from all fields when cataloguing both bibliographic records and authority records. Whitespace characters that will be stripped are spaces, newlines, carriage returns, and tabs
Ability to change authority type while editing record [30930]
This feature, sponsored by Educational Services Australia SCIS, provides the ability to easily change the MARC authority type used while editing an authority record. This means you can easily switch the framework being used, including tags, default values, mandatory fields, and more.
Lists
Add permission and setting for public lists to allow staff with permission to edit contents [30418]
Many Koha libraries were experiencing a problem when staff in control of public lists moved on from the library, and they could no longer make changes to the list. Koha now has an option to allow changes to lists from ‘permitted staff only’.
A permitted staff member requires the ‘catalogue’ permission enabled and the new ‘edit_public_list_contents’ sub-permission enabled. With both of these permissions they will be able to edit all lists that allow changes from ‘permitted staff only’.
Notices
Move emails for sending cart and list contents into notices tool [3150]
This enhancement creates notices using Template Toolkit syntax for sending emails containing cart (named CART) and list (named LIST) contents. This provides libraries more flexibility around what the emails contain and means they can be more translatable.
OPAC
Add ‘Report a concern’ feature for patrons to report concerns about catalog records [31028]
This brings a new catalogue concerns feature to the OPAC and staff interface, allowing non-cataloguers to report issues with catalogue records from the record details pages.
Reported concerns will be visible in the dashboard on the staff interface and available from the cataloguing home page.
The feature can be independently enabled for OPAC and staff interface using the `OpacCatalogConcerns` and `CatalogConcerns` system preferences.
Show patron’s ‘savings’ on the OPAC [31051]
This is an exciting new feature, sponsored by Horowhenua Libraries Trust, that allows library users to see how much money they have saved by using the library instead of purchasing new books.
This feature can be enabled using the OPACShowSavings system preference, which sets where on the OPAC a user may be shown their savings.
Patrons should be able to delete their patron messages [12029]
This enhancement adds the ability for users to dismiss an OPAC message, marking it as read to remove it from their summary page.
Reports
Add auto-completion to our SQL reports editor [32613]
Auto-complete is now available when writing reports using SQL. This makes accessing the database values easier, therefore simplifying the report writing process.
Tools
More visibly highlight records that cannot be batch deleted/modified [31611]
When batch deleting or modifying, sometimes items or records will not qualify for deletion or modification. For example, items that are currently issued to a user will not be safe to delete.
With this enhancement sponsored by Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, Koha libraries can easily see which items are not going to be deleted. Hovering over the ‘X’ in the highlighted row will provide details about why it will not be deleted.
Command-line utilities
Specify action of action_logs entries to purge [32686]
Koha comes with a script that can be run daily to ‘cleanup the database’. It can clear out logged in sessions, sent messages, and old action logs, for example. Many libraries use specific action logs in their daily operations and do not want to clear them out, but may be happy to delete other logs.
With this enhancement sponsored by Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology, Koha administrators can now configure the cleanup_database.pl script to purge logs based on the action, allowing libraries to be more intentional about which logs they store.
For example, libraries may be interested in user modification logs but not need to store logs about when a user is added to their system. Koha administrators can now implement this for the cleanup script.
./cleanup_database.pl --logs 365 --log-module=MEMBERS --log-action=CREATE --confirm
Read more about the 872 features, enhancements, and security and bug fixes of the 23.05 Release on the Koha Community website.
Written by Wainui Witika-Park, Catalyst Koha Developer and Aleisha Amohia, Catalyst Koha Technical Lead.
Catalyst Koha
If you have any questions or comments about this News item, or would like some support with your Koha instance, you are welcome to email us at [email protected] (New Zealand) or [email protected] (Australia).