Migration to Koha : A study about librarians’ experiences with open source integrated library systems

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine how librarians experience migration to an open source integrated library system (ILS) in order to analyze how humans and technology influence each other, in line with a socio-technical perspective. We therefore examine how the librarians’ attitudes change during the migration process, what difficulties and possibilities they see in each phase and what the significance of open source is in this context. The method used in this study is qualitative interviews with librarians in one public library and one university library that migrated to the ILS Koha on the same day. The theoretical framework is a socio-technical perspective and actor-network theory. To analyze the result, Michel Callon’s translation was applied to the empirical data. The results of this study show that the librarians interviewed had indifferent or positive attitudes towards Koha. We could also see that those who had roles with more responsibility in the library often showed a greater interest in the problems and community surrounding Koha. The public library experienced significantly more problems with the migration which resulted in a tough transition but did not alter their attitudes