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But seriously… why FOSS?

Tl; dr: it’s the values

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Wait, who are you?

My name is Liz Rea

I’m originally from Kansas.

My Dad worked for a nonprofit consortium of colleges

My Mom worked for the arts council (also nonprofit)

I’ve only worked in what felt like truly “corporate” environments for a total of ~1.5 years in my entire life. ��All of the rest of my career: Education and Library settings, either adjacent or directly.

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You can see I come by this honestly.

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F(l)OSS those values:

Sharing
Openness
Collaboration
Doing good things for humanity
Cooperation (and coopetition!)
Many hands make light work
Being good stewards of the resources we are given

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It’s kinda about the benjamins.

Libraries and library adjacent institutions can often be places where we want to do the most good with the least amount of money. ��Story about the first open source ILS in use at NEKLS, openbiblio, at mclouth library�- small library, no money�- newly established library!�- they wanted to buy materials and do programs, not software/hardware (this is probably sounding familiar)�- NEKLS was there to support them in their technology needs - and they needed a library system. I bet you think I’m going to say we installed Koha there - you’d be wrong!�- we installed a different open ILS available at the time: openbiblio, and it worked well… for a time. And the price was right - a desktop grade computer with a big for the time disk, linux/apache/mysql/php, and the barest of MARC support. It worked. It was a good experience.�- I said “we should find a way to do this Bigger and Better!”

I didn't know that the impulse to do that would lead to… bigger and better foss projects.�

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As we’ve learned - there were bigger things happening at NEKLS

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So… Koha?

I mean… this is obvious right?

Actually, it wasn’t obvious.

�…but it didn’t stop us

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We want to provide the best we can for the resources we can allocate.

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This feels forward thinking.

Not many are doing this yet!

We decided to migrate �from Sirsi to Koha 3.0.

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So… that went well then?

In the end, NEKLS is still with Koha.

And I’m still working on/with Koha.

Long story short: ��The beginning of the ride was bumpy. There was community drama. We changed Koha vendors. We waited for developments. We waded through bugs and upgrades and customisations, meanwhile refining and revising what it meant to be a consortium and working together with what seemed like an ever increasing number of libraries coming in. We dealt with scaling in the system, with slowness and crashiness and bad data and rural internet.

There were meetings, many meetings. We questioned whether we were doing the right thing - and always we said “yes, we are” ��In the spirit of openness and collaboration we worked through the problems with the help of our various Koha vendors, offered up system time and resources to the Koha community, and embraced openness, sharing, and interoperability. NEKLS still has a huge hand in KohaUS, as evidenced by the fact that I am presenting to you from Lawrence, KS, which is the NEKLS home base.

In the end, NEKLS is still with Koha (and I’m still working on Koha)

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Then, what’s next?

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Thanks for listening :)