The Perl and Koha Conference
Thu, 14-Sep-2023 by
Amber Krawczyk
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The first ever Perl and Koha conference was held in Helsinki, Finland this year. It featured three main days of Perl and Koha presentations and two days of workshops. Workshops included a Perl training session, a masterclass for new Koha developers, Koha improvement initiatives, discussions on the future of Perl as a language, and more.
Koha is the first free open source software library automation package. In use worldwide its development is steered by a growing community of users. Koha is a framework developed in Perl with modules stored on CPAN. Koha allows end users to borrow books from within district and national library systems. A large number of attendees were Koha front end users that are primarily made up of librarians. Perl community members made up an estimated third of attendees. While the connection between these two communities may not be obvious, they benefit from working together.
I was graciously given time to interview two attendees, Salve and Julien, they say there was room for cross interaction between Koha and Perl during talks and workshops, and speakers from both gave talks about mentoring that were attended by members from both communities. Community members also interacted during lightning talks and social events, such as the reception. The reception was held in the National Library in Helsinki and was impressive to the attendees.
Most of the people involved with Koha are librarians looking to make their lives better at work. In the eyes of some attendees, coding is something you do to reach a goal and Perl is well matched with Koha because of this. Koha also has a strong community, similar to our Perl community. Open source projects like Koha can save schools and public libraries thousands of dollars.
Finally, both of the interviewees found the opening talks especially moving. Olga Dibrova, The Ukrainian ambassador to Finland, was a surprise speaker at the opening. She spoke about the devastating impact the Russian invasion has caused on Ukrainian libraries and the urgency to rebuild those structures once it can be safely done. Perl/Koha conference organizer Andrii, also supports Ukrainian libraries and has created a project to help rebuild not only structures, but also the book collections that have been burned during the war. For more information about the Ukrainian Libraries help and post-war restoration initiative, visit https://perlkohacon.fi/ULRI.html .
Next year the conference will be held in Montreal, Canada.
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