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    March 23rd, 2011LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    Follows Portico's Successful Preservation of 80 Million Files from Eighteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of Modern Law and Eight Other Gale Collections

    Farmington Hills, Mich. and Princeton, NJ, March 23, 2011 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and Portico, part of the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA, today announced Gale will be preserving three additional digital historical collections with Portico. This follows the completed ingest of 10 Gale Digital Collections—including 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, The Making of Modern Law: Primary Resources and Eighteenth Century Collections Online—and represents over 80 million files (75 million pages of content), which doubled the size of the Portico archive in just one year.

    “We are excited to expand our agreement with Portico,” said Frank Menchaca, executive vice president and publisher, Gale. “With more and more content moving online and being produced in digital-only format, we realize the importance of ensuring our unparalleled content and collections will remain accessible to our customers even in the unlikely event of a service disruption.”

    The three additional Gale collections being committed to the Portico archive comprise over one million files, and include Dictionary of Literary Biography, Something About the Author Online and Literature Criticism Online. With the addition of these collections, the total number of files being preserved from Gale in the Portico archive will reach over 82 million, representing an achievement of scale for Portico. Collections preserved in 2010 include:
    • Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and ECCO Part II, New Editions
    • The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises
    • The Making of Modern Law: Trials
    • The Making of Modern Law: Supreme Court Records and Briefs
    • Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature
    • Sabin Americana
    • 19th Century British Library Newspapers
    • 17th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
    • 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers
    • 19th Century U.S. Newspapers

    “Portico’s successful ingest of the first 10 collections, totaling over 11 terabytes, is a great accomplishment in our history,” said Eileen Fenton, Portico managing director. “It represents the progress we have made in the scalability of our workflow. We are delighted to continue this work with Gale to ensure the long term preservation and permanent access of this vital content for its customers.”

    In accordance with Portico’s D-Collections Service model, Portico will make the content available to Gale’s customers under specifically defined circumstances called “trigger events.” Should the content no longer be made available through the Gale system or from other sources, or if Gale were to experience an extended service interruption, Portico would make the content preserved in the archive available to Gale’s customers. There is no charge from Gale to its customers for this service.

    To celebrate the preservation of these collections, Gale and Portico will host a reception in the Gale booth (#805) at the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference in Philadelphia on the evening of March 30.

    For more information, please contact Kristina Massari at kristina.massari@cengage.com or Marita LaMonica at marita.lamonica@ithaka.org.

    About Cengage Learning and Gale
    Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, serves the world's information and education needs through its vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools and on the Internet. It is best known for the accuracy, breadth and convenience of its data, addressing all types of information needs – from homework help to health questions to business profiles – in a variety of formats. For more information, visit www.cengage.com or www.gale.com.

    About Portico
    Portico is a not-for-profit community-driven digital preservation service for e-books, e-journals, and other scholarly e-content. To date, more than 12,000 e-journals, nearly 70,000 e-books, and 39 d-collections have been committed to the archive. Portico is supported by more than 700 libraries worldwide and over 120 publishers representing more than 2000 scholarly societies and associations. Portico is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. For more information, visit www.portico.org or www.ithaka.org.

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  • scissors
    March 23rd, 2011LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    March 23nd 2011
    CONTACT:
    Nathan Curulla
    (888) 900-8944
    sales@bywatersolutions.com

    Plumas County Library System Now Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

    ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, announced today that the Plumas County Library System of Plumas County, CA. is now live on their official Koha integrated library system.

    Plumas County Library and the Open Source-Open Libraries Consortium have partnered with ByWater Solutions for their Koha implementation. The library system's Koha installation will be moved into the NorthNet union catalog which will be made up of several Northern California libraries who have chosen to move to Koha with support and implementation services provided by ByWater. The Plumas County Library System is made up of four branches located in Quincy, Chester, Greenville, and Portola.

    Margaret Miles, County Librarian of the Plumas County Library, commented on their move to Koha and ByWater Solutions:

    "I am not a techie, and we were able to accomplish the migration with technical assistance provided by ByWater Solutions. They were great at explaining everything to us in English, answering our questions and keeping us on schedule. Cheryl Gould from InfoPeople provided us with a great all-day all-staff training one month before we went live, and ByWater gave us a test database with our own data so we could practice and experiment during the month."

    She continues: "Plumas County Library started investigating migrating to Koha because the North Net Cooperative Library System obtained a grant that would pay our migration costs and the first year of support. With support costs on our current system threatening to sink us, I was all in favor of finding a cheaper alternative. The crucial factor was determining if Koha could do everything we needed it to do."

    Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater stated: "We are excited to be one step closer to forming the collaborative NorthNet Catalog. Margaret and the staff of Plumas have been a joy to work with during this process and we look forward to a long and productive relationship with Plumas and the other NorthNet Libraries"

    About the Plumas County Library:
    The Plumas County Library provides free access to printed, audio-visual and electronic forms of in- formation, and educates the community as to the uses and value of resources. Serving as a gateway to knowledge beyond its collection, the Library is a reflection of the community, a gathering of its knowledge, culture and information. The Plumas County Library System is made up of four branches located in Quincy, Chester, Greenville, and Portola. For more information please visit: http://plumascounty.us/index.aspx?nid=546

    About Open Source-Open Libraries:

    Open Source – Open Libraries is a consortia of libraries, library systems, and other organizations committed to pursuing Open Source Software alternatives for libraries. The primary focus of the project is on Open Source Library Systems as potential replacements for commercial, proprietary integrated library systems (ILS). The goal is to empower libraries and library consortia by encouraging participation and collaboration in software products generally, and encouraging them to consider an Open Source Library System such as Koha or Evergreen. Just as libraries provide opportunities for people to empower themselves, Open Source Software provides an opportunity for libraries to empower themselves by asserting more control over the software tools used to run their libraries. The project is funded by member contributions combined with support from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. For more information please visit: http://opensource.califa.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