Koha-US Fresh Perspectives 2021 Conference, 23 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: Taking Koha to Places It Really Wasn’t Intended to Go - Fred King

Description

A presentation in three acts:
- How to set up Koha as a Z39.50 server.
- What to do about “contact the webmaster at [no address given]
- How to use scripts to run complex commands

A

My name is fred king, I'm, a medical librarian at medstar washington hospital center in washington dc.

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And I am known on six continents as the traveling companion to the avenging chicken who does not show up very well today.

B

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See bywater and equinox and all the others are really great wonderful people, but some libraries can't afford their services and if you have a really small library with a few interesting things in it, you may not be able to afford to install co-op with their help, so the presentations and videos etc that I've done are for people who have a computer have a knack for working with computers and a lot of time.

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Earlier this year I put out a video on installing koa from the command line. uh Part two, where I take that uh basic setup and then configure it and is not quite ready. uh The filming you have screenshots and.

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Other things take about ninety percent of the time and then putting the voice over and the music and the editing take about the other 90 of the time.

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For this instance, I created a library called the cheerful valley, public library. I can see it at cheerful valleypl.online, never mind where it's located somewhere in maryland.

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Email addresses for it don't work yet, but they will.

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It looks really rough. It looks like it was built in basement by some guy and a stuffed chicken, but on the other hand it took me maybe an hour and a half from command line to finish product, but that's not what I'm going to talk about today today. I have.

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Three other things that either I find annoying and it clears up the annoyance or well you'll, see okay. Now, I'm going to share my screen.

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A

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Should be sharing windows, media player.

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Can you see it.

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Looks like the stream is just catching up with me, so yes, this is well you'll, see.

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This isn't a co-op problem exactly, but it is something that comes up while I'm using koa that I find kind of annoying. So I'm going to show you how to change.

B

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Sometimes, when you're checking something in.

C

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Out or putting a hole in something or trying to cancel a hold you'll get this for help. Please send mail to the webmaster no address, given that's not very helpful.

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So I'm going to show you how to add an address I'm going to log into the cheerful valley, public library, command line, I'm going to log in as librarian.

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And now I'm going to edit the library apache configuration file, I'm not the super user this time. So I have to use sudo to turn me into one, and the file name is slash. Etsy, slash, apache2, slash sites, dash available, slash library.conf.

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Configuration file put in the password for the librarian again and now I am going to scroll down to the section that controls the opec.

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And up up a couple: okay, the line you need to add is capital s, server, capital, a admin all one word and then an email address. It doesn't have to be webmaster at something. But that's the convention. In this case yeah I'm going to use webmaster at cheerful valley, pl, dot online, I'm going to exit.

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Saving the file.

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And now I'm going to go back to trying to check in something.

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Well, I still can't check it in, but at least your users will have an address to write to.

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Okay, it looks like uh the youtube stream is about 20 to 30 seconds behind me. I'm not looking at that monitor anymore. It's too confusing. Okay, here's! My second video um you may have noticed that the music and the narration have slightly different volumes. That's something that I need to tweak, um and I include my address on all of these koa avenging chicken dot online, because I will I'm eager to receive suggestions for improvement.

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uh Not just this.

D

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But yeah it's let's make it better. So let's try the second one. Now.

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In a previous presentation, I referred to z3950 as a thing you can use to get stuff in this presentation, I'm going to show you how to use z3950 as a thing to give away stuff, in particular cataloging records and I'm using the instructions on the koa wiki called setting up the z3950 in sru server.

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Let's say your catalog has a bunch of interesting and unique records because you have a local collection but, and you would like to share it with the rest of the world. This is how you can do it.

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First of all, let me log into the cheerful valley, public library, and look up an author whose name is sam's.

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This constitutes my unique collection, which isn't all that isn't unique at all, but let's pretend it is and they have six books in it.

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The cheerful valley, public library, is a very small library.

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So let me log into the server cheerfulvalleypl.online.

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And I'm going to move the window, so you can see it login as librarian.

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And now I am going to turn myself into a super user.

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So I don't have to keep typing in sudo, all right: the command to activate the z3950 server. Encode is koa, z3950 responder enable and the instance- and that's all you have to do. You can go into the z3950 directory to modify things. I didn't need to.

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Then you have to enable it coa, z, 3950 dash responder dash dash start instance. In this case library.

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And that is all you have to do, and your library is now a z3950 server. So now what well I'm going to go to market.

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And I'm going to set up the cheerful valley, public library is a source to put in name.

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Cheerful valley, public library,.

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The host cheerful valley, pl, dot online.

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Database for koa is biblios and by default it uses port two one: zero zero and I'm going to use mark 21. Because that's what I do, I'm going to save.

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And now I'm going to select the database cheerful valley, public library,.

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And I'm going to search for the author by the last name of sam's.

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Click search and found six records and I'm going to save this.

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In one of my project directories.

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I'm going to save it as sams.mrc.

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And actually for demonstration purposes, I'm going to put the mrc file on the desktop where it's easy to find.

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And I'm going to use mark breaker and guess what here are six mark records.

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The cheerful valley, public library, collection,.

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Okay, and now we come to the final one, I hope the volume, the music and narration is a little more even this time, I'm certainly going to go back and change the volume or the z3950 one.

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B

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Okay, try again.

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C

C

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So here are a few scripts and what they do, and you really.

B

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To take notes just go to avengingchicken.online, look at the bottom and they're a lot.

D

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Do if you're a super user, but you can also do terrible things to your system you put in the wrong command. So please be careful.

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The scripts are designed for the bash shell, which is what you usually get when you install ubuntu type, echo dollar sign zero on the command line. If the system responds with bash you're all set.

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Okay, let's start out with add key, which will add a key in your system. So you don't get a lot of warning messages.

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Add stable, add old, stable and add old old, stable, we'll have the repository for the most current stable release. Second, most current or third most current and if you're getting advice from me, you want to stay away from the unstable version that one's for developers find password is a shortcut or what I was trying to do at the beginning.

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It's really showing the password that you use when you start configuring koa.

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Home page replaces the file that shows the apache default web page with your libraries web page.

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But scripts are not just for installing koa. There are a lot of things you need to run from the command line, and here are a couple of them.

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Restart apache will restart the apache web server.

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Re-Index runs the koa rebuild zebra command and if your instance is named something other than library you're, far more creative than I am, and you need to replace library with the name of your instance in the script file.

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So if you want to download these scripts from the avenging chicken website, you make yourself a super user.

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And the system remembers me, so I don't have to type in the password then type in wget dash. I.

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Http colon slash.

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Then http colon slash, slash avengingchicken.online and that is http, not https. I'll. Take care of that someday.

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You see it downloaded a lot of things. Let's take a look.

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Okay, they're all the scripts and, as you can see over in the left side, they don't have a lot of permissions.

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Chmod 777 asterisk gives the files read, write and execute permission for everyone on the system.

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Now I can see rwx rwxrwx.

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And that's all there is to it.

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Can you make one yourself? Let's say you don't like one of my commands or you want to add something else. Of course you can make yourself a super user open a text editor I like using nano, because it's fairly easy first line, you need to put pound bang, slash bin, slash, bash and type the command. You want to run, save your file and then chmod 777 and the file name in this case.

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I'm building a script to restart the z3950 server.

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But there's one thing: you need to remember: if you write your script in windows and upload it to your server, it's not going to work because windows and linux use different characters, the ends of lines and they're not compatible.

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So here's an example of what you get.

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Well, that's all I have to say about scripts for now, so goodbye until next time.

D

That's good fred. uh We've got about five minutes left for questions. uh If you, if you want to see, if anybody there has any questions.

C

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Well, some composer asked if it was based on a play by beckett. um No.

D

The first part of that third video is pretty awesome.

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Yes, I'm not sure if koa us wants to be associated that way, my employer does not want to be because my production values aren't as slick as theirs, which is fine.

D

I'm not seeing a lot of questions actually.

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D

In the youtube chats.

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I think everyone's falling asleep.

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D

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Yeah I figured.

D

I know it was good, um so I'll ask a question what um what software did you say you were using to create these videos.

A

uh Let's see one open shot: okay, video and, let's see, I think it's called wondershare to do.

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The screen recordings, and sometimes I incorporate the sound and video together I was using audacity, but then I'd have to link up the audacity file with the video.

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So with wondershare you can just play a video and then record as you go along.

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Okay, open shot can separate the video and audio tracks, which can be very helpful, and what else do I use.

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Well, just those three uh open shot and wonder and audacity.

D

Well, as far as training videos go uh other than your issue with the sound, I think these were pretty awesome.

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D

We are running out of time, and I know ed wants to say something to the people that are in the room there about the group picture.

A

Okay, well, thank you, and I wish I were there.

D

Take care I wish I was there too.