What Koha is, and why libraries choose it
Koha is the world's first open-source integrated library system (ILS). It was created in New Zealand in 1999 and is maintained today by an international community of librarians and developers, which publishes two major releases a year. It covers everything a library runs day to day: cataloging in MARC21, circulation, acquisitions, serials, patron management, reports and a public catalog (OPAC) that users search from any device.
Libraries move to Koha for three reasons. There is no license fee, so the budget that used to go to an annual subscription goes to services that improve the library instead. The data belongs to the institution, in standard formats it can export at any time. And Koha is mature: thousands of academic, public, school and special libraries around the world run it in production.
What Koha does not include is the work of putting it into service. Installing it, migrating years of records without losing loans or holds, configuring circulation rules that match your policies and keeping the system patched and upgraded is specialized work. That is the work BiblioLabTech does.
How BiblioLabTech implements Koha
BiblioLabTech delivers Koha projects end to end, so the library deals with one team from the first assessment to the last upgrade. A project usually covers four areas.
Installation and configuration
We deploy Koha on the infrastructure the institution chooses and configure it around the library's real policies: MARC frameworks, item types, collection codes, circulation and fine rules, patron categories, staff permissions, notices and the OPAC. Libraries with several branches can run them all in one instance with shared or separate rules.
Migration from your current system
Migrating to Koha is where projects succeed or fail. BiblioLabTech extracts the data from the current system, maps it field by field and runs test loads until the counts and the samples match. Before the final load we deliver a data-quality report with duplicates, empty mandatory fields, inconsistent authorities and broken character encodings, and the library decides what is fixed automatically and what is reviewed by hand.
Training by role
Instead of one general session, BiblioLabTech trains each team on the work it actually does: technical services, circulation, acquisitions and serials, and system administration for IT. Training happens on the library's own instance, with its own catalog, and every session is recorded.
Support and upgrades
After go-live, the library moves to annual support: incident response with agreed response times, functional help for staff and planned Koha upgrades tested in staging before they reach production. Read what Koha support includes for the details.
AI-assisted cataloging, included
Every Koha implementation by BiblioLabTech includes BiblioScan AI at no extra cost. The cataloger photographs the cover, the title page and the table of contents; BiblioScan AI reads them and fills in a draft MARC21 record inside Koha. The cataloger reviews, corrects and saves, so bibliographic control stays human while the repetitive transcription disappears. For libraries with cataloging backlogs this changes the economics of the project. See how AI cataloging works step by step.
Hosting: your servers or ours
Koha runs on Linux with open-source components, so there are no operating-system or database licenses either. Some institutions must keep patron data on their own infrastructure; in that case BiblioLabTech installs Koha there and hands over a documented server with backups and monitoring configured. Others prefer not to run servers at all and choose managed Koha hosting, with daily backups, HTTPS, uptime monitoring and security updates handled by our team.
What drives the cost of a Koha project
Because there is no license, the cost of Koha is the cost of the services around it. The factors that move it most are the volume and quality of the records to migrate, the number of branches in the instance, the integrations with campus systems and who hosts the system. A clean MARC21 catalog costs far less to migrate than a proprietary format with unnormalized records. Our guide to Koha implementation cost breaks down reference ranges component by component.
Where Koha with BiblioLabTech is running today
The Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería Julio Garavito runs its catalog on Koha with BiblioScan AI cataloging, alongside a DSpace repository, the BiblioMeta discovery layer and a reference chatbot, all on a dedicated server administered by BiblioLabTech. Read the full case study.
BiblioLabTech works remotely with libraries in any country. Our team is based in Colombia (UTC−5), which overlaps the full working day across the Americas and the afternoon in Europe and Africa. Tell us about your library and we will reply with a scoped proposal: what the project involves, how long it takes and what it costs.
Koha is free software developed and maintained by its international community at koha-community.org.