A good example of this is in recent work we did with the Houses of Parliament to bring the web-based Koha LMS up to the highest levels of accessibility for users. The project to bring the system up to WCAG 2.1 AA­was­initially­confined­to­our­developers­ and­staff­at­Parliament­but­it­ended­up­ sparking the interest of users in the USA who were keen to contribute their time. This wider community buy in to the need to continually drive-up accessibility of the software has resulted in a change to the Koha community quality assurance processes and made accessibility thresh- olds mandatory in the development of new features.


Aspen Discovery website. Privacy


So Another increasingly important trend to be abreast of is the growing disquiet about privacy and about controls over access to our data. Whilst the example we have just described of a user being able to access records about their print, ebook, magazine and music borrow- ing history all together with personal information about reading preferences, ratings,­fines,­family­connections­and­ demographics is wonderful functionality, it does bring with it questions about data ownership, encryption of data, man- agement and security. Building robust authentication into systems as well as ensuring the very highest standards of secure data management and storage is key. As too are securing the interchanges between­different­systems­–­particu- larly if they are owned or managed by different­companies.­Good­open-source­


systems have tools in them to allow users to take control of their personal data but also to allow the library to delete data once it is no longer ‘necessary’ to be kept. Privacy and security has always been at the heart of libraries and librarianship in the same way that it has always been at the heart of the open source movement. For example, there are many web usage analytic platforms out there but do they all anonymise personal browsing habits so that the link between an individual and their private data trail can’t be passed on to other potential interested parties? The open-source analytics plat- form, Matomo, does!


Working with the diverse range of cus- tomers helps us to understand the unique challenges­facing­some­very­different­ libraries. We can often respond to these challenges through our involvement in the global open source development communities of the products we support.


What is so nice about working with open source is that you are just a small part of a much larger, global community. Some people may have the impression that open source is chaotic and disorgan- ised but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most large and established open- source projects like Koha and FOLIO have well established structured teams working on all aspects of the software, from quality assurance to documentation and security. Also unique to open source is that we don’t ‘compete’ with other Koha or FOLIO vendors we ‘cooperate’. That may seem like a strange concept but the ultimate success of Koha or FOLIO brings success to all of us, whether it be libraries or support companies like ourselves. We work with open-source software because we believe there are positive outcomes for us, libraries, their users and the wider world. In this particularly difficult­year­this­has­seemed­more­rele- vant to us than ever as we all try and help each other through this pandemic. Take what we need and give back what we can. And, in a year when libraries have spent a lot of the time closed, in our world, the library really is OPEN! BG


FOLIO eRM module.


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