March 4, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
staff@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions Celebrates One Year of Providing Open Source Services to Libraries

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, celebrated their one year anniversary for providing quality implementation and support services for open source ILS’s such as Koha and Evergreen.

Since its forming in 2009, ByWater Solutions’ management team has tripled in size, and includes Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager and author of the popular blog, What I Learned Today, and Ian Walls, Vice President of the Koha users group KUDOS.

In addition to ByWater’s internal growth, the company now supports well over 40 libraries, including the Nelsonville Public Library of Athens, OH; the first to adopt Koha in the U.S. ByWater Solutions services libraries of all types, from public to corporate, and all sizes, from small town to consortiums. They have received an amazing response to the higher levels of service they strive to provide.

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater, comments on their first year in business: “I could not be happier with the direction our company is headed. We are grateful for the interest we have received from libraries, and are focusing on growing in a way that is commensurate with our ability to provide the personalized service and support our customers have come to expect from us. We have the right team on board to provide the best possible solution for libraries seeking an open source alternative for their ILS.”

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: www.bywatersolutions.com

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). For more information about Koha, please visit
www.koha-community.org

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.
For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, please visit www.evergreen-ils.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norcross, GA — March 4, 2010
Beacon Falls Public Library and Douglas Library of Hebron are the first members of Connecticut’s Bibliomation consortium to go live with the Evergreen open source ILS. Bibliomation opted to begin the move to Evergreen with a set of five pilot libraries. Slater Public Library, Windham Free Public Library, and Jonathan Trumbull Library will complete the initial group and are expected live at a later date. The entire consortium is expected live on Evergreen in 2011.

Beacon Falls Public Library has a collection of 15,430 bibliographic items and the library serves 3,152 patrons. Douglas Library of Hebron has a collection of 42,298 bibliographic items and the library serves 5,140 patrons.
According to Amy Terlaga, Assistant Director,User Services for Bibliomation, “Evergreen is the perfect library system for a consortium like Bibliomation. We’re very excited to be bringing up the first Connecticut libraries on this extremely flexible open source ILS. For some of these development partner libraries, Evergreen will be their first automated system. We can’t wait to migrate the entire Bibliomation network sometime in 2011. It can’t come soon enough for us!”
Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, says “We are thrilled to have the first Bibliomation libraries up and running on Evergreen. They have approached the move to open source with such enthusiasm and continue to be a huge voice of support for the open source community.”

About Bibliomation
Founded in 1980, Bibliomation has grown into the largest of the Connecticut networks. They operate as a member driven, non-profit organization with 48 public libraries, 23 K-12 libraries, and 5 development partner libraries across the state. Bibliomation provides a wide array of information, telecommunications, and automation services in order to serve the ever changing technological needs of the network’s member libraries.
For more information about Bibliomation, please visit http://www.biblio.org/.

About Evergreen
Evergreen is a robust, highly scalable, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia.
Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained 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 over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.
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 services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113
Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

I invite you to order my new book, On the Strand, published by World Audience Publishers, New York City. Strand picks up in a memoir where my first book, Waking Up in the Studebaker, of the two-book series, left off.

Was it fate or responsibility that brought me to the plains? Or an escape? And why Kansas? Certainly a girl was involved. Three for sure! The reason for heading west from my home in Virginia and making a new one in Kansas is long and complicated. Maybe this is why I always looked at myself as the silent observer, as well as the kid who continually questioned his actions.

When I finished my original manuscript for On the Strand, I asked a friend from my past – who just so happens to be a character in this story – how she remembered me from age 11, when we first met, to 21 the last time we talked together in a favorite Richmond bar called the Hitching Post, until I tracked her down via the internet in 2001. She wrote, “Kind, shy, quiet, and very loyal. You had a dry sense of humor and were ‘on the wild side’ and always ready for something different – always questioning things and authority: REBELLIOUS!!!” She ended her memory with a telling statement: “You were hard on yourself and did not believe in Kevin.” She pegged me alright!

Friends from my past, when we reunited via the internet after as many as 40 years, were so surprised to find out that I – the underachiever – who barely graduated from high school had become a teacher. “How?” they often asked. I told them there had been a lot of unseen learning going on at the time and very little of it taking place within the confining walls of school buildings.

I began my memories with Waking Up in the Studebaker (2008), which covers my childhood in Richmond, Virginia’s suburbs, through entering high school. On the Strand (2010) carries my story forward through high school and leaving Virginia to give college a try in Kansas. What an East Coast attitude I took with me: “I’m here to get the bullshit classes out of the way and return to a good college in Virginia.” Breaking with my past in an attempt to lower the time spent in bars, allowing more time for study, is one of the reasons I chose Kansas. Little did I know, Pittsburg, Kansas was one major bar/club city in southeast Kansas.

Life happened. And what a ride, including the girls (three in particular – they meant the world to me), endless trips to Virginia Beach, New York City, keeping track of the war (Vietnam), defeating the high school dress code, the Atlantic City Pop (Pot) Festival, a trip to Europe, bars and clubs, the Fillmore East, the Valencia Hotel in Greenwich Village, knowing Bruce Springsteen - prior to beginning the E Street Band – the 1970 draft lottery, the 1971 march in Chicago to stop the war, cross country hitch hiking trips and trips in a Fastback VW, and constantly wondering how I could make something of myself, when I had barely graduated from high school.

Would college be any different? Would I be able to get past the bullshit given students by teachers from both private and public school curriculum expectations back in the grades? Would I stop feeling like the dumbass? Who knows, but I knew travel would be required to place me in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1971, and that sounded damn good to me, the wayward kid with no set direction. Little did I know I had chosen Playboy magazines’ latest first place choice for the national Small College Party School, dominated by dime pitchers, bucket night, Coors (not sold east of the Mississippi), pool tables and foosball, and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.”

This is my story, the one so many of my high school and community college English students inquired about for so many years, when they asked, “Why Kansas Gray?” Bruce Springsteen even asked me, “Why Kansas, Gray?” As if I had been a nut for leaving Virginia, they would ask, “But don’t they have the ocean and the mountains?” And, so, I had to answer with whatever sounded good but for the most part, skirting the truth. Perhaps the book should have been titled, Why Kansas? Or simply To Kansas.

Against the odds, I became an English teacher, journalist and columnist. Not bad for a shy, asthmatic kid, who hated school and English classes for so many years. Not bad at all. I invite you to read my story.

When working on the original manuscript as my thesis for a degree in creative nonfiction through the McGregor School of Antioch University, I read hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies. Those writers I attempted to model before developing my own style included but were not limited to Isabel Allendi, Tobias Wolfe, Frank Conroy, Anatole Broyard, Frank McCourt, Quinten Crisp, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Bill Roorbach, Hope Edelman, and Rick Bragg.

This book is not for anyone who dislikes off-color language and intimate situations, but I could not recreate the main character, Kevin, nor could I call this memoir and social reflection without the sounds and feel of the times. I sometimes refer to the narrative and dialog as “bar speak.” It can be stilted and quick chatter, much like people speak in bars. I spent time, lots of it in bars and loud clubs. The drinking age was 18, and so I spent time where bands could be found drinking and smoking, but of course I already leaved that life and stop smoking, and replace it with e-cigarettes products from sites as https://puffbar.com online. According to Wphealthcarenews not only can people avoid smoking, but the technology allows you to adjust the temperature settings of the heating element and control vapor quality and intensity.If you are looking for CBD hemp flowers you can buy online at sfweekly.

Check out my publisher’s website at worldaudience.org or go directly to amazon.com. Or visit the AuthorsDen website. Better yet, check out my website, soon to publish, at onthestrand.org.

Second Phase of Natural Resources Canada Libraries Now Live on Evergreen
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norcross, GA –March 3, 2010

Natural Resources Canada Library (NRCan), has gone live with the second phase of their migration to Evergreen, the consortial open-source library automation software. Equinox Software Inc., the support and development company for Evergreen, oversaw the migration and is providing ongoing 24/7 technical support. This new set of libraries joins those from the first phase of migrations which was completed over the summer. The NRCan Libraries, which had been using two separate integrated library systems, opted to migrate in phased deployments. There are now approximately 500,000 bibliographic records on the new combined catalog.
With thirteen government libraries located across the country, NRCan seeks to enhance the responsible development and use of Canada’s natural resource through their goal of shared service initiatives between the government’s IT staff, agency departments, and outside vendor partnerships.
According to George Duimovich, Manager of Library Applications for NRCan, “Evergreen is particularly well suited to the government library context. There are a number of 'shared services' initiatives in government IT, and being on the Evergreen platform has definite advantages for libraries which need flexibility and unrestricted partnership possibilities. At a time when the role of government libraries is being re-examined, we're able to maintain a level of innovation and change in tune with the circumstances, engaging both internal IT resources as well as independent, competitively sourced vendor support when required.”

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox, says “Government libraries have unique challenges and needs when considering an ILS. The flexibility of Evergreen made it an ideal choice for NRCan and the added convenience of now having all libraries running on the same system will be a huge benefit.”

About Evergreen
Evergreen is a robust, highly scalable, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia.
Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained 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 over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.
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 services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113
Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.