(30 May 2021) The Center for Khmer Studies is pleased to announce that we have received a grant from the Equinox Open Library Initiative to upgrade our online catalog. CKS is one of two grant recipients of the Equinox Open Source Grant. The Equinox Open Source Grant program provides migration, implementation, hosting, and support of the Koha Integrated Library System to eligible libraries, archives, museums, and other educational, cultural, and information organizations.
The CKS library currently holds more than 20,000 items specializing in Southeast Asian history, social science, art, linguistics and other subjects. To help achieve our mission, our collection needs to be organized and accessible for all of our visitors. In 2020, Internet visitors from more than 110 countries viewed over 120,000 pages in our online catalog. Sixty-seven percent of these visitors accessed our content with a mobile phone. Our current online catalog has served us well, however CKS is looking to meet the needs of a growing digital community.
Over the past year, CKS explored options to relaunch our online catalog with three key objectives. First, we sought to make it easier for people to find our collection by publishing our catalog online with open access for researchers, other libraries, and search engines such as Google. Second, we wanted to be sure our catalog is easy to use, and intuitive for both library visitors and staff. Finally, we want our catalog leverage software that is actively maintained and regularly enhanced.
Our search led us to Koha, the world’s first free and open source library. Koha is a full-featured library management system running at 3,738 libraries worldwide. Koha offers powerful search capabilities, leveraging content from Google, Amazon, Open Library and other data providers. It is a web-based system, compliant with the most common library standards (MARC 21, UNIMARC, z39.50, etc.) with open source code supported by a global community. Learn more at koha-community.org.
The announcement in full is here.
