John Kinder Theological Library share how they’ve improved the discoverability of their content by customising their Koha OPAC using Koha plugins and reports.
John Kinder Theological Library wanted distance learners to have the same experience as people walking through the doors, especially when it came to discovering new books.
The library and archive hub for the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia is also known as Te Haahi Mihinare ki Niu Tireni, ki Nga Moutere o Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. The library holds a collection of over 120,000 online and physical resources about the Anglican Church history in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific. They'd been using Koha, an open source library management system, since 2018, hosted by Rōpū kohinga at Catalyst.
Recently, we caught up with Jing Shen, Digital Services Librarian at John Kinder Theological Library, to learn how she used Koha tools, including plugins and reports, to customise the OPAC.
Pictured: John Kinder Theological Library Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) before the customisation.
John Kinder Theological Library felt its Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) was static. New books arrived, but online users had no way of knowing they existed unless they specifically searched for them. Jing found a carousel plugin for Koha online that would solve the problem. This ability to grow and innovate on her own terms is one of the reasons she likes using Koha. You build what you need. You own it. No permission to innovate required.
“Koha is more approachable, hands-on, and evolves quickly compared with other library management systems (LMS).” Jing shares. “It can evolve quickly”.
The ‘Carousel Instructions’ plugin is a pre-built add-on that can be plugged into Koha to provide new functionality. It creates a rotating display of book covers on the homepage, just like a physical ‘new books’ display in the library.
Plugins offer specific functionality and are published outside of the Koha Community’s rigorous quality assurance checks. To keep Koha systems secure, users must request vendor support to enable the use of plugins. So, when Jing needed it enabled, she reached out to Rōpū kohinga, who sorted it for her.
Once enabled, the John Kinder team could install plugins and customise their library website however they wanted.
The library already ran regular Koha reports (over 200 of them) covering circulation, overdue items, membership, and more. Jing created a new report using SQL (structured query language) to dynamically pull newly added resources. She wrote the report to return resources added in the previous 30 days, so the carousel could automatically regenerate using a date calculation rather than a hardcoded date that Jing would need to manually update for new results.
That report feeds the carousel. New titles, including eBooks, can now appear prominently on the homepage.
Jing shares that "the new books carousel plugin is a game-changer for us because it not only looks appealing but also makes our collection of new books, including eBooks, more discoverable."
It was important for John Kinder Library to ensure distance learners have a similar experience to those visiting the library in person, especially with new books. Since configuring the plugin, distance learners now see what's new the moment they visit the site. No hunting required.
If you’re interested in customising your Koha OPAC, Jing shares her advice:
Don't feel intimidated: If you have some HTML and CSS knowledge, you should be able to handle it.
Establish some goals: For instance, improving the discoverability of new items.
Start with a test environment: Familiarise yourself with the OPAC layout and make changes one at a time.
Make it a team project: Get plenty of feedback from your team along the way.
Save time for troubleshooting: It’s a great idea to practise your updates in a dedicated test environment, so you can refine them in your own time.
We very much appreciate Catalyst’s encouragement and help.
Since implementing the changes, the homepage draws more attention to new releases and eBooks. Additionally, with the carousel live, the team noticed some books didn't have cover images. So, they uploaded images themselves directly into Koha records and turned on a setting (OPACAmazonCoverImages.) that pulls covers automatically from online sources.
Jing shares that “The team loves the new look and the general feedback has been positive.”
Jing didn't wait for a vendor roadmap. She didn't pay extra for a feature that should have been standard. She identified what her library needed, figured out how to build it, got the support to bring it to life for her library and in just two weeks had a solution that solved a problem for the library’s community.
That's the whole point of open source. You're not renting your library system. You're not stuck with what someone else decided you need. You build it. You know it. You own it. And when you figure out something useful, like Jing did, you can share it with other libraries doing the same thing.
Rōpū kohinga can help you figure out what's possible. Whether you're testing out theme customisations or need plugins enabled, Rōpū kohinga are happy to help.
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