Myka Kennedy Stephens
Myka Kennedy Stephens is Seminary Librarian at Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States. She initiated the library’s migration to Koha in December 2014 and actively seeks to integrate strategic planning for library and information services with open source adoption and development. Since migrating to Koha, Lancaster Theological Seminary has also adopted open source solutions for library guides, digital archives and exhibits, as well as digital asset management and internal records. Myka is a strong advocate for open source software and has enjoyed learning new skills and participating in the Koha community. Although often caught up in the work of “doing” open source, she writes about and presents on her open source experiences with some regularity.
Catch me at Kohacon20
Day 2, 2:00-2:25pm: A patron, a librarian, and a developer walk into a bar: The conversations and relationships that fuel Koha development - Myka Kennedy Stephens (pre-recorded, online)
It takes multiple perspectives and a variety of expertise to build a successful open source library system. As the Koha community looks toward the future, it must continue keeping the needs of libraries and their patrons at the forefront of development. How does this actually work? How do these relationships form, and how are they maintained? How does the patron experience influence development? This talk will explore the communication flow between patrons, librarians, and developers in the Koha community. It will also share a case study from one Koha library showing how an integrated library planning process has helped contribute to the Koha development cycle.
Online presence
- Blog: http://www.mission-information.org
- “The Future of the Small Theological Library,” Theological Librarianship, 9:1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v9i1.411
- “Small and Thriving: A Follow-Up to ‘The Future of the Small Theological Library’,” Atla Summary of Proceedings: Seventy-Third Annual Conference (2019), https://doi.org/10.31046/proceedings.2019.1606
- “Leveraging Open Source Library Guides: Integrating Koha and Subjects Plus,” KohaCon 2018, https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nXYgUfIl8crguLM_EFL1iiYEhIV5zccL (slides), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KA7iGCDMbw (video)
- “The Power and Promise of Koha’s ILL Module,” Koha-US Conference 2019, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTmGXgEN0XjRrr5qgPt9gtiVe_kIm7a5Ixg1W2uJNMiwD5hDz5kI4Zcq8lG7scRABgHrISdk-OqxpMv/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000 (slides)
- “Enabling Elasticsearch: Finding Pitfalls and Power on the Bleeding Edge,” with Nick Clemens and Andrew Fuerste-Henry, Koha-US Conference 2019, https://youtu.be/moS_s6RY7N4 (recording)