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America's First Public Koha Library Chooses ByWater Solutions
February 1st, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
staff@bywatersolutions.com
America’s First Public Koha Library Chooses ByWater Solutions
ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that Nelsonville Public Library, serving Athens County, Ohio since 1935, has partnered with them for the implementation of Koha, the open source integrated library system.
Nelsonville has contracted with ByWater Solutions for the migration, hosting, and support of their Koha integrated library system.
In 2003, Nelsonville Public Library was the first public library in the United States to make the switch to Koha. Since then they have been strong supporters of the open source model and the Koha community. Owen Leonard, Web Developer for the Athens County Libraries, has volunteered as the Interface Design Manager for Koha since version 3.0. To help foster this continued community participation, Owen and staff will be granted complete access to the Nelsonville servers and the Koha code base.
Owen explains the library’s decision to switch to ByWater Solutions:
“Because of their level of personalized attention, we believe that ByWater Solutions will be a perfect fit for our library. We’re looking forward to working with a partner that believes, as we do, in the importance of Open Source. The Nelsonville Public Library has long been a significant contributor to the development of Koha, and we’re excited to be partnering with a support company that will help us continue that work.”
ByWater Solutions CEO, Brendan Gallagher states:
“Nelsonville Public Library is an excellent example of the advantages a library can gain from adopting open source. This is going to be a very exciting partnership and we look forward to supporting the innovative ideas that come out of Nelsonville.”
About Nelsonville Public Library:
“Nelsonville Public Library” is the legal name of the Athens County Public Libraries, a network of seven library buildings containing roughly 300,000 items, with administrative offices and central processing facilities located in the Nelsonville Public Library. The system began in 1935 as an extension service of the Nelsonville school district. The Nelsonville Public Library was the first public library in the United States to implement the Koha ILS and has sponsored several functionality improvements to Koha including the initial MARC development and the Z39.50 server. For more information please visit: www.myacpl.org or check out their online catalog at: http://search.myacpl.org/
About Koha:
Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.
Koha’s OPAC, circ, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies–XHTML, CSS and Javascript–making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL).
About ByWater Solutions:
With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems. Offering a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them. ByWater Solutions pledges to share 100% of all developed code to the Koha community for the strengthening and advancement of the Koha ILS. For more information about ByWater Solutions, please visit: bywatersolutions.com
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