February 7th 2011
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Nathan Curulla
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The Massachusetts Library System Chooses ByWater Solutions For Koha Support

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Massachusetts Library System, of Waltham, Massachusetts has partnered with them for Koha support and hosting services.

The MLS' MassCat Koha catalog was transferred onto ByWater's servers in early January by ByWater Solutions' implementation team with very positive results.

Nora Blake, Manager of MassCat, commented on the MLS' decision to switch to ByWater's hosting and support services: "We were already using an open source solution and were looking for an improved hosting and support solution for our shared Koha system." She continues: "ByWater’s approach to hosting and supporting Koha systems is to offer the best service possible and to make sure their customers are satisfied. ByWater pays attention to controlling bugs and other system problems, they offer timely responses to questions and they do all of this with a friendly attitude. ByWater emphasizes good customer service, which was the most important aspect in our search for a vendor to host our Koha system and to provide us with support in using it."

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater stated: "We are thrilled to partner with Nora and the team of the Massachusetts Library System. MassCat was one of the earliest large scale library systems in the United States to adopt Koha, and is a shining example of Koha's versatility and scalability. We welcome the staff of the MLS and look forward to a long and productive partnership together."

The MassCat catalog is made up of roughly 70 libraries and houses over 480,000 bibliographic records. For more information and to search their online catalog, please visit: http://masscat.org

About the Massachusetts Library System:
The Massachusetts Library System, a state-supported collaborative, fosters cooperation, communication, innovation, and sharing among member libraries of all types. The MLS promotes equitable access to excellent library services and resources for all who live, work, or study in Massachusetts.

MassCat is a library catalog of holdings from school, medical, law, special and public libraries. The MassCat catalog contains materials from libraries with very diverse holdings. For more information please visit: http://www.masslibsystem.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, circulation, 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: http://www.koha-community.org

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: http://www.bywatersolutions.com