May 10th, 2010
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions to Exhibit at This Year’s Annual ALA Conference in Washington DC

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that they will be exhibiting at this year’s annual American Library Association Conference in Washington DC at booth number 817.

Since its creation in March of 2009, ByWater Solutions has grown by leaps and bounds. They currently support over 65 libraries nationwide and cater to all types of libraries including public, private, academic, medical and law.

“This is our first exhibition at a major annual conference and we could not be more excited to take part in this years ALA conference” stated Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater. He continued; “Our taking part in the show signifies a major step in the progress of our company and offers an excellent forum for us to offer our services to the library world.”

ByWater Solutions’ Booth 817 will have live demos and information for those who are curious about open source software and Koha. It will also be a great opportunity to speak with a ByWater representative about your library’s needs.

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 the American Library Association:
Founded on October 6, 1876 during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the American Library Association was created to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all. Our current strategic plan, ALA Ahead to 2010, calls for continued work in the areas of Advocacy and Value of the Profession, Education, Public Policy and Standards, Building the Profession, Membership and Organizational Excellence. For more information please visit: www.ala.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). For more information about Koha, please visit
www.koha-community.org

~ Designed to Assist Native Spanish-speaking Users with General Research Needs ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — May 7, 2010 — EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) has released a new resource for its Spanish-speaking users. Referencia Latina™ is the definitive general reference resource for the rapidly growing native Spanish-speaking population in the United States covering issues in Latin America and Spain, as well as US and Global affairs.

Designed to assist native Spanish-speaking users with their general research needs, Referencia Latina includes a 49,000 entry Spanish-language encyclopedia, 2,500 evidence-based, graphical health reports as well as 50,000 images most with Spanish-language captions. Referencia Latina also contains a Spanish-English dictionary, an atlas consisting of more than 330 Spanish-language maps, over 100 reference books and dozens of general interest magazines.

With Referencia Latina public libraries are also able to provide their Spanish-speaking patrons with the most current articles from a dozen prominent newspapers from 10 Latin American countries such as: Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina and Costa Rica.

Referencia Latina provides users with a unique Spanish-language interface making content readily accessible for non-English speakers with limited online research experience. As the non-English speaking population continues to grow in public libraries, EBSCO is dedicated to expanding its ethnic and multicultural coverage.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, INSPEC®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world.

EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than and other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

Quick! You have 5 minutes to tell your colleagues about a great reference program, resource, service, or idea (maybe even about what you think will be the future of reference).

We’re looking for ideas that inspire and engage our students and patrons and make their lives easier and better. Maybe you'll tell us about a new technology that will change the way we do business. Or one that just makes it easier for users to reach professional help at the library.

Since time is short, lightning talks are fast and fun and require little effort beyond the expertise and experience you already have. And, of course, by including photos or videos you can pack even more information into your presentation. Lightning talks will give more people a chance to participate and will allow many more ideas to be thrown into our two-day discussion about the future of reference.

A Reference Renaissance 2010: Inventing the Future will be August 8-10, 2010 in Denver, CO, so when you register for the conference, click the lightning talk participation box and submit a title (or two or four). We want to hear what’s new and cool with reference services at your library. What do you worry about when you think about our future? What do you hope for? Are you working on a project that you believe represents some of what the future has to offer us? We're looking for a nice mixture of practical, visionary, funny, dire, and inventive. Wherever you are in the library or your career - from library director to library student - you have something to add to this discussion.

Your early submission will help us plan a better conference, but you will also have a chance at the conference to sign up to do a lightning talk.

http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html