Research, research, research

I am a true reference librarian. I need to research a lot before I begin any project or assignment. I almost need to know everything about a topic before I decide to do anything (this is a bad habit I know).

My goal was to find out how to install Koha, what resources I would need, what I would need to know, and the different approaches I could take (if any). Therefore, I needed to do some research.

• I first attempted to just Google "Installing Koha". Google is most often my first port of call, and through this found the Koha Community, and although this page was helpful, in terms of describing what I would need to know, it didn't give me step-by-step instructions from beginning to end.
• After seeing this page, I decided to search the library for how to books on not only Koha, but Perl, MySQL, and Apache, so that I could also refer to these when necessary.
• Through this, I also found the Community Wiki and email lists, which I thought would prove helpful if and when I encountered issues.
• Through searching the Community Wiki, I found install instructions for Debian and Ubuntu, and established that Debian Squeeze was the recommended operating system for install but that any Linux-based operating system should work.
• None of these contained instructions for setting up the Linux environment in the first place, so I again did some Google searching, using terms such as "Setting up a Linux (or Debian) Server," and found several options that I could use on my Windows computer, including VirtualBox and creating a separate partition and installing a Linux operating system on it. However, I was in the process of moving house and was unsure about my internet connection, so did not want it on my home PC where I could possibly lose my connection, and nobody would be able to see my server.
• I had resigned myself to having to take this risk, but I still had one more thing to search for: a video tutorial. I am a visual learner, so I decided to search YouTube and Google for video instructions of people installing Koha from scratch. That is when I stumbled upon a video called - Koha in 11 minutes. I was sold! I started to watch it, and they were using Amazon Web Services (AWS). I decided to investigate this to see if I could use this to run Koha.
• AWS did indeed have a free tier of services, which I found suited my needs perfectly. I decided to follow the video's lead and use AWS with an installation of Debian Squeeze.

What this taught me: Doing initial research is important. It allowed me to get a handle on what this project would involve, and allowed me to see many different approaches to take, and to choose the one which most suited my needs. Also, although Google searching is effective, looking beyond the initial page it finds to others on the same website can sometimes yield even better content than that discovered by Google. In future, I will remember to look beyond the page that Google found to see what other gems the website may contain.