IT Services: dbkit and Koha take spotlight

In July 2025, the IT department of the KIT Library held an internal anniversary event to honour key milestones in the history of its IT systems. These have accompanied the KIT Library - and previously the Karlsruhe University Library - for over a quarter of a century and have created and further developed the technical infrastructure for many central services.

Focus was placed on i3v library system, which will be replaced in 2023, database-toolkit dbkit and the new open sourcelibarary system Koha.

Head of IT Uwe Dierolf took the guests on a journey through time: i3v was developed in 1990 at the Faculty of Computer Science on Macintosh systems and formed the basis for the library system i3v-Library, which was used at the KIT library under Windows between 1996 and 2023.

Clemens Tubach then presented the applications based on dbkit that have been implemented over the past 20 years. dbkit was created in 2004 as a further development of i3v - with the aim of transferring the many good ideas of the i3v core system to the world of web-based, decentralised data collection. The best-known application based on dbkit is the KITopen repository.

The event ‘A quarter of a century of IT services’ was concluded by Michaela Sieber, who presented the previous and planned milestones at Koha.

After the state-wide search for a standardised library system for academic libraries in Baden-Württemberg came to an unsuccessful end after almost two years, the KIT library decided in 2022 to become the first university library in Germany to use Koha. This bold step is now regarded as proof of concept that Koha can also be used successfully in large libraries in Germany. The necessary adaptations were realised by the KIT library's IT team itself or with the support of the international Koha community.

KIT Library is currently applying to organise the international KohaCon 2026 - a further step towards a sustainable open source partnership.