FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco, CA - September 10, 2009

Responding to the increasing use of virtual reference services amongst patrons and the massive industry-wide adoption of social media as a must-have presence for libraries, Mosio launches RefStart: A dynamic, web-based mobile reference utility to help manage virtual reference, social media and online search.

RefStart gives librarians customizable one-click access to reference tools, search engines, web 2.0 sites and popular social networks, providing a single starting place to answer patron inquiries. The application provides easy access to a single web page to manage Facebook and Twitter, search Google, Wolfram|Alpha, World of Congress and Librarian’s Internet Index, launch instant messenger services and receive alerts of new Text a Librarian questions.

As a standard feature of Text a Librarian, RefStart helps increase productivity and makes reference easier. Visit http://www.textalibrarian.com/mobileref/ for more info.

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About Mosio's Text a Librarian

Accessible by over 250 million U.S. phones, Text a Librarian is an easy, organized and efficient text message reference service that enables libraries to engage with patrons on their mobile devices. Text a Librarian's web-based interface includes a suite of features that increase workflow efficiencies while maintaining patron privacy. Text a Librarian was developed specifically for libraries and is now the fastest growing SMS reference service technology in the library industry. http://www.textalibrarian.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norcross, GA — September 9, 2009

Evergreen, the robust, highly-scalable open source library software that powers online catalogs for hundreds of libraries worldwide, celebrates its third birthday with a look back at how far it has come since September 5, 2006, when nearly 260 public libraries in the Georgia PINES resource-sharing network migrated to a single shared Evergreen catalog.
In three short years, Evergreen has experienced phenomenal growth. Evergreen is known to power live production catalogs in at least 8 states and 4 countries, including Georgia, Alaska, California, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Canada, India, and (we have heard) South Africa. A 10-library regional consortium in Texas will be live by mid-September. Well over 400 libraries are known to run Evergreen, with a cumulative population served estimated at over 6 million. (Because Evergreen is true open source—free to download, free to use, free to modify—it may be running in many more libraries worldwide.)
Evergreen, originally developed for a statewide catalog for public libraries, now runs in every type library, and can be found powering catalogs for academic and law libraries in Canada, school libraries in Michigan, the National Weather Center Library in Oklahoma, and tribal libraries in Indiana.
According to Brad LaJeunesse, company president for Equinox, the Evergreen support and development company founded by the original Evergreen developers, “The decision by Georgia Public Library Service to build its own software from the ground up was something that had never been done before on this scale. We are very proud that Evergreen’s success in Georgia has caused other libraries across the country and around the world to take notice.” LaJeunesse added that Equinox was doing twice as many migrations in 2009 as in the previous year.
Lamar Veatch, Georgia State Librarian, commented about the development of Evergreen, “You only get a rare shot in having an impact. We took a big risk, but I had confidence in those guys. And by the time I got to that point, I felt like we didn’t have any other option. There was no other place to go but try this.”
Elizabeth McKinney, Program Director for Georgia PINES, said, “We never imagined the level of interest the library community would have in an open source project like Evergreen. The library community was watching and waiting for us to go live on Day 1." Julie Walker, Deputy State Librarian for Georgia, added, “Who would have thought that Georgia would lead the way to a new option, really a new dimension, in library automation? I think every PINES library staff member in Georgia should take a moment to bask in the success that is Evergreen.”
Since migrating to Evergreen in 2006, Evergreen’s robust, scalable framework and reliability has allowed PINES to add over a dozen more libraries to its statewide catalog.
For more about Evergreen’s success story, including interesting statistics and comments from the Evergreen community, see the Evergreen community blog post, “Evergreen at Three.” http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=228
About Evergreen
Evergreen is powerful, highly scalable open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites.
Since its debut in September 2006 as the software powering the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium, Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports hundreds of libraries of every type—public, academic, special, and school media—in 12 states and 2 countries.
Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service. For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.
Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide comprehensive support for Evergreen, the consortial-quality, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox develops, supports, trains, migrates, integrates, and consults on Evergreen, and engages with the rapidly expanding Evergreen community. Equinox also offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers.
For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.
Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

http://www.openphi.com/files/HL_PBCC.pdf

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Palm Beach Community College Pilots Semantic Search Engine for Health Knowledge.

Florida Startup Offers Multi-lingual Scientific, Open Access Health Content to 18,000 Students

August 25, 2009. (MIAMI, FLORIDA) - Palm Beach Community College ("PBCC") is the first community college to join a pilot program to deploy the HealthLibrarian semantic search engine for health data across its campuses and accessible to all PBCC students and staff.

HealthLibrarian is different from traditional search engines: it does not blindly crawl the web, or present matches based on a site's popularity. HealthLibrarian intelligently sorts and categorizes health-related information available from validated, academic, governmental and scientific sources in the so-called "Deep Web." Users can then interactively fine-tune their query to maximize the relevance of the result set. The results presented are highly relevant and specific to the conditions or diseases of interest, and grouped by the geographical areas selected by the user. Visit http://www.HealthLibrarian.net/search to see HealthLibrarian in action now.

"Students in PBCC's Allied Health professions will use HealthLibrarian to access high-quality bio-medical and health-related knowledge produced by academic and government entities worldwide," said Jacqueline Rogers, Dean of Health Sciences and Public Safety at PBCC. "We plan to integrate HealthLibrarian with our Distance Education programs as well as our Content Management System. And the availability of materials in Spanish and other languages will be very useful to our students as they practice in our diverse community," Ms. Rogers concluded.

HealthLibrarian includes a growing number of datasources, including: Medline; FDA adverse events databases; NIH grants; Evidence-Based Medicine ("EBM") guidelines from the UK, US: Clinical Trials; Drug Information; product label for drugs sold in the US and Spain; mental health and substance abuse Providers; as well as thousands of Open Access articles. "Flat acquisition budgets make Open Access materials a viable, low-cost alternative to give our students access to high-quality, scientific peer-reviewed articles. The Open Access journals indexed in HealthLibrarian cover the same subject areas as many commercial journals from Toll Access publishers," said Brian Kelley, Director of the Library Learning Resource Center (LLRC) at PBCC. "We chose to join the HealthLibrarian pilot program to be able to tailor the service to our needs. And we appreciate its very flexible licensing terms for unlimited campus-wide access," Mr. Kelley concluded.

"HealthLibrarian provides a Unified Discovery Service and Semantic Search Engine for Biological and Health Knowledge with over 25 million records already stored in our repository," said Jose C. Lacal, Chief Vision Officer of OpenPHI. "HealthLibrarian goes beyond federated search: it's a one-stop shop discovery interface helping users to locate pre-processed, indexed bio-medical materials, electronic journal articles, books and multimedia resources. All within a single easy to use interface," Mr. Lacal concluded.

HealthLibrarian sidesteps the problems inherent in federated search by physically storing, indexing, and retrieving information from its own digital repository. All of the content accessible via HealthLibrarian is pre-indexed and allows users to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible bio-medical content in one place.

About Palm Beach Community College

About Palm Beach Community College: Serving more than 49,000 students annually, Palm Beach Community College is the largest institution of higher education in Palm Beach County, providing the bachelor's degree, associate degrees, professional certificates, career training and lifelong learning. Florida's first public community college, PBCC offers more than 100 programs of study at locations in Lake Worth, Boca Raton, Palm Beach Gardens and Belle Glade.

About HealthLibrarian

HealthLibrarian is an On-demand Data Warehouse of Global Health-related Insight. Our system integrates search, data mining, web crawling and indexing of health data from validated global sources. HealthLibrarian can be licensed for use with Health IT systems (such as Electronic Health Records), by libraries, or by government agencies.

HealthLibrarian is a service of Open Personalized Health Informatics, Corp. ("OpenPHI"), a self-funded, privately held bio-informatics startup in Miami, Florida. While some try to "improve the healthcare system," we focus on "building a care system that improves our health." We call that "Personalized Health." OpenPHI simplifies the use of the vast amount of health databases, publications, and medical know-how freely available from academic and government sources across the world.

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Media Contacts

For OpenPHI:
Jose C. Lacal
Open Personalized Health Informatics, Inc.
+1 (954) 553-1984
Jose.Lacal@OpenPHI.com

COLUMBUS, OH --Sept. 2, 2009-- LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries and ASCC (Automation System Colorado Consortium in Colorado), announced today that the consortium has selected a Koha ZOOM hosted solution for their next integrated library system and union catalog.

The Koha installation will be hosted at one of LibLime's secure data centers. The Library has also contracted with LibLime for full migration of their ILS data, as well as support and training services.

ASCC is a nonprofit, member-owned consortium of over 40 multi-type libraries, including 24 public libraries (out of 115 in the state), 15 schools, 3 academic institutions and 1 special library.

ASCC’s new Koha union catalog will contain over 800,000 bibliographic records from libraries with collections that range in size from 2,730 to 117,000 bibliographic records.

"We believe our union catalog consortium will enhance connections between Colorado’s libraries and improve services to 292,684 residents in our members' service area, " said Valerie Horton, Executive Director of ASCC. ASCC plans to have 9 pilot libraries up in November of 2009, and the remaining libraries will migrate in 2010 and into 2011.

ASCC selected Koha not only due to a desire for an open-source solution, but also because member libraries wanted a flexible, member-driven system instead of one controlled by commercial vendors.

"Rather than force its member libraries to align their needs with a specific vendor’s software, ASCC needs a software solution that matches existing technological requirements and supports members’ patron needs," explained Dan Lawrence, Chair of the ASCC Board. "The Koha open-source solution offers the opportunity for the development of the ILS to be driven by our member libraries."

ASCC has been given a unique opportunity to serve as a model project to other libraries and consortia in the state of Colorado. Technology has made great strides in the industry and librarians have been in the forefront of this industry. "The move to Koha represents a new opportunity to bring quality patron services," Valerie added. "By working in communities, member libraries can achieve more patron services with less funding."

"After working in the library industry for more than 15 years, I am most satisfied when I can assist libraries in making a technology decision," said Marc Roberson, VP Library Partners for LibLime. "The ASCC is a perfect example of how a technology choice will now enable a group of libraries to share a system and allow them to better steer their own destiny-- a choice that will serve them well into the future."

About ASCC

ASCC is a nonprofit, member-owned consortium in Colorado of over 40 multi-type libraries, including 24 public libraries (out of 115 in the state), 15 schools, 3 academic institutions and 1 special library.

About Koha ZOOM

Koha ZOOM is the next-generation release of the award-winning Koha open-source integrated library system. Notably, it includes a powerful search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM's search engine can read structured records in practically any input format (e.g., email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries. It supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records) as well as incremental, safe database updates on live systems.

To try out Koha ZOOM for yourself, visit LibLime's demos:

http://liblime.com/demos

About LibLime

LibLime is the global leader in open-source solutions for libraries, with a mission to make open source accessible to libraries. Rather than sell software licenses for static, hard-to-customize software products, LibLime educates libraries about the benefits of open source, enabling them to make choices about how best to provide their communities and staff with better technology services. LibLime then facilitates implementation of open-source in libraries by providing outstanding development, customization, support and training solutions--solutions tailored to each library's needs. For more information, see http://liblime.com.

Press Contact:

Tina Burger
Vice President Marketing, LibLime
(888)Koha ILS (564-2457) ext. 705

tnb@liblime.com

LibLime and the LibLime logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of LibLime. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Ask-WA is pleased to announce the launch of Washington State's first online virtual reference portal. Connecting more than 60 libraries across the state, and backed by a worldwide cooperative, Ask-WA provides 24/7 reference service to the library users of Washington State.

Ask-WA is an essential resource for students looking for citations at three in the morning, for Washington residents doing personal research, for genealogists. Washington librarians are available to help you get started on that tough research project, investigate your family roots, or even just settle a bet.

Don't wait, ask us a question now at http://ask.wa.gov!