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    August 17th, 2011LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    Norcross, GA —August 17, 2011

    The community of Evergreen libraries has had a busy six months (January through June, 2011) owing to the addition of 114 library systems with 140 separate branches and outlets. This six-month experience eclipsed the growth seen in the community in any previous year.

    In July, a blog post detailed cumulative summary numbers in the growth of Evergreen since its first libraries were migrated in 2006. See the “State of Evergreen, June 30, 2011” (http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=602).

    For this six-month period, most of the migrations were of public libraries but also included two academic libraries, a special library and two K-12 libraries. K-12 libraries are currently one of the fastest growing types of library in the community.

    Most of the migration activity centered around consortia—a continuing strength of Evergreen—both by adding libraries to existing consortia and by welcoming new consortia: Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC) in Massachusetts and the NC Cardinal consortium in North Carolina. MVLC migrated its first group: 35 systems with 41 outlets over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend and NC Cardinal's first library went live with Evergreen in late June.

    BibliOak, a project of the Connecticut-based Bibliomation consortium, also had a large migration in June. Amy Terlaga, Assistant Director for User Services at Bibliomation, summarized the migration and their plans: “With Evergreen, last May we were able to fold in our 48 public library members to an already thriving network of 10 public libraries and three K-12 schools. Now we're about to add our 19 K-12 schools in time for the new school year. We're thrilled to have such a robust, flexible open source system that allows for easy configuration given our ever expanding needs.”

    Reflecting the fact that Evergreen is open source, free software, there have been a variety of methods used by the various implementers of Evergreen over time. Unlike proprietary systems, where libraries are locked into one vendor, with open source, there is an array of choices for libraries. Many of these libraries and consortia migrate using their own staff and resources; others use open source vendors for some or all parts of their migrations and subsequent support. The growth of the community and the growth of choices for its users have resulted in a healthy, robust ecosystem as reflected in the experience of the first six months of 2011.

    About Evergreen
    Evergreen is a robust, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. However, it has also proven equally successful scaled down for even the smallest libraries.
    Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 280-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 almost 1000 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community includes libraries across 4 countries including 18 U.S. states and 8 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, training, 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, 770-709-5571
    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.

  • scissors
    August 17th, 2011LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    In August, 2011 students at the Documentation Research & Training Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute, at the Bangalore Centre (DRTC) will be using LibLime Academic Koha as part of their coursework. DRTC is a premier library science school in India, founded by father of library science in India, Dr. S.R.Ranganathan. DRTC offers 2 year M.S. program in library and information science.
    Students in Professor K. S. Raghavan’s “Cataloging Theory and Practice” course will have access to their own production ILS to assist them in completing their coursework.

    LibLime will provide the class, Professor Raghavan, and his assistant, Pradeep Balaji B., with a hosted installation of LibLime Academic Koha, free of charge. Students will have full cataloging access in the cataloging module, including MARC Bibliographic records, MARC Holdings records, and item records. They will be able to create their own set of collection codes, location codes, and item types. They will create actual working records for discovery access in the OPAC.

    “I would like to thank LibLime team very much for this generous Koha with Class program, which would go a long way in training and learning among us in the institute,” said Pradeep Balaji B. “Cataloguing Theory & Practice paper is part of the course for the first year M.S. Library and Information Science Students. In this course, I assist Prof. K.S. Raghavan in practice sessions. My classes are planned to familiarize the students with MARC and AACR2 cataloguing codes. With Koha getting more popular in India as free ILMS with its amazing features of support of Unicode-compliance for Indic script, superior cataloguing module of creating records, importing records from other cooperatives, it would be more beneficial for the students, learning by a live demonstration than manual practice. The classes for this paper will be held from August till November, 2011.

    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.