In August, 2011 students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science will be using LibLime Academic Koha as part of their coursework. Students in Professor Bobby Bothmann’s “Cataloging and Classification I” course will have the ability to learn cataloging and classification firsthand by creating records in their own ILS.
LibLime will provide the class and Professor Bothmann with a hosted installation of LibLime Academic Koha, free of charge. This will allow the students unlimited access and all privileges associated with the staff end of the ILS as well as all OPAC functionality for the duration of the course. They can create, edit, and delete MARC records, review them in the OPAC, and see how the ILS indexes work for retrieval.

“Having taught cataloging and classification for a few years”, said Professor Bothmann, “I have found one of the stumbling blocks is how to effectively teach the importance of what MARC 21 coding does for the patron, so I'm very excited to have students create records in a real environment, observe how MARC tags and indicators effect the OPAC display, and to see how indexing works.”

LibLime's Koha with Class program is designed to give library school faculty a chance to embed the use of an ILS into their coursework and curricula. Students gain practical experience with library automation software as they prepare to enter the library workforce. LibLime provides free support for these Koha with Class installations, and already there are dozens of faculty members throughout North America taking advantage of this program. LibLime is looking to expand the program overseas to support librarianship at an international level.

To learn more about the program visit - http://www.liblime.com/we-give-back.