A survey of Koha in Australian special libraries : open source brings new opportunities to the outback

01 April 2011

Since 2007, the library management systems landscape has changed markedly, with a variety of open source systems gaining an increasing share of the market. In Australia, penetration by open source systems has been led by the recent adoption of Koha by an increasing number of libraries. This paper presents a case study of Koha in a rural health library setting, and then presents the results of the first survey of Australian Koha users regarding the viability and practicality of this popular open source system. This survey encompasses both libraries using Koha support companies, and also some which have self-installed systems.