Sweden

View from Maivor's office at Hogskolan I Gavle

After Norway I flew to Stockholm and then caught a train to Gavle ready for a Swedish usergroup meeting the next day. I had a lovely evening meal with Per Falks and Maivor Hallen from Hogskolan I Gavle. I ate reindeer - yum!

Hogskolan has beautiful library; so light filled and elegant and with great spaces for students including 30 (yes - not a typo) bookable rooms for small group work. Maivor gave me a tour and it was clearly a very well used space for the university students onsite.

The usergroup was well attended - 40 people at a rough guess - and there were a number of presentations about Koha including Oslo public library showcasing their wonderful work which went live this week.

I was concerned to hear one library speak about how hard it was 'going it alone' who recently switched to Koha and felt they had no one to talk too or help.

They do not appear to have found the Koha community and the various help channels: irc online chat, discussion list, online tutorials etc. The koha-community.org website is a wonderful resource and the community is always happy to help.

There are many ways to switch to Koha from full-service, hosted through a vendor, onsite servers with either vendor support or do-it-yourself. There is at least one vendor in Scandinavia: Libriotech who has clients in Norway and Sweden.

Some of the 30 rooms available for