Flexibility of Koha and User Experience

by Jessie Zairo on Jan 29, 2016

Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate with several of our partners from Hernando County Public Library and Lake County Library System. We met to develop a user experience program on open source and Koha here in Florida. While brainstorming ideas about user experience for patrons, our group discussed nearly as many positive points about their staff user experience after migrating to an open source ILS.

Public libraries serve the community, customizing services for a multitude of users and often focus solely on the customer experience. However, library staff are also regular, and more frequent, users of our product. Improvements to the staff experience in Koha equate to more efficiency, information accuracy and a better work environment all around.

It was fantastic to hear how our partners have maximized the flexibility of Koha to improve the staff user experience. A specific topic that was brought up was the ability to create your own reports in Koha. In their former software, it could take a full day to obtain the information needed for library and state statistics. Now, these libraries can retrieve that same information within an hour.

In addition to affordability and reliability, Hernando County and Lake County have also found that improved tools and interfaces, and the ability to customize these, has made staff work and processes more efficient and enjoyable. With staff’s approving attitude about Koha, this positivity impacts service and customer satisfaction. It is always great to hear what our partners have experienced using Koha so we can share that information with the community.