North Bethesda, MD, March 7, 2013- The Berthoud Community Library District, located in Berthoud, Colorado, has joined the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) and is now live on the AspenCat LibLime Koha union catalog.

The Berthoud Library District staff worked with LibLime Project Management to migrate bibliographic, item, and patron data from their legacy ILS system to LibLime Koha 4.14. The Berthoud Community Library District will enjoy autonomy within the CLiC union catalog, as LibLime Koha 4.14 includes the Solr search engine with full faceted searching, support for local ownership of patron records, local ownership of items records linked to communal bibliographic records and OPAC group searching for pre-designated collections. Berthoud patrons will also benefit from resource sharing in the consortium, which is managed by the expanded functionality in the Holds Queue service.

With the addition of Berthoud Community Library District, over 360,000 bibliographic records are now included in the CLiC AspenCat LibLime Koha union catalog.

About the Berthoud Community Library District
The Berthoud Community Library District was established in 1931 by the Berthoud Women’s Club and fully staffed by volunteers. Sixty four years later, the dream of a separate library facility became a reality when the current library facility opened in 1995. In addition to many volunteers, the library is now staffed by a library director, a fulltime youth services librarian, and several assistants. The Berthoud Community Library District strives to provide access to popular and informational books, other materials, and services that inform, educate, and culturally enrich the people of the Berthoud Community.

About the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC)
CLiC, headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, serves over 400 libraries throughout the state. 35 of these libraries are part of the AspenCat LibLime Koha union catalog. Currently the database includes over 587,000 items. Resource sharing is one of the key components of the system with libraries requesting over 1,200 items from each other every month. Requests are growing as more patrons discover how easy it is to request an item not held at his or her home library. CLiC is committed to maintaining AspenCat as a fully featured, patron-focused system. In partnership with the Colorado State Library, they have added links to external databases (EzProxy), Plinket-hosted website access, and SWIFT interconnectivity. They are also currently offering a cooperative purchase for downloadable audio books from Recorded Books, and ebooks from the 3M Library Cloud system. For more information, please contact Shannon O’Grady at 303-422-1150 or SOGrady@clicweb.org.

About LibLime - PTFS
LibLime – PTFS is the global leader in providing support for the Koha open source ILS. Rather than sell software licenses for static, hard-to-customize software products, the PTFS LibLime Division educates libraries about the benefits of open source, enabling them to make choices about how best to provide their communities and staff with better technology services. The PTFS LibLime Division then facilitates deployment of Koha in libraries by providing outstanding consulting, development, implementation, and support/hosting for libraries of all types and sizes. PTFS is also the developer of the world’s leading content management software, ArchivalWare, and specializes in meeting library personnel staffing requirements, digitization, and metadata keying services. For more information, see http://liblime.com or http://ptfs.com or http://archivalware.net.

3/7/2013
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Three New Libraries Join VOKAL With ByWater Solutions’ Koha Support

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and the U.S.’ forefront provider of Koha support, is happy to welcome Hartford, Bradford and St. Albans Libraries to the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL). All three libraries are now live on the Koha integrated library system through VOKAL.

VOKAL now has 46 libraries using the system which has nearly 778,000 items available to 75,000 patrons. The new libraries add over 60,500 new items to the shared collection.

Debra Tinkham, Director of the Bradford Public Library shared her decision to join VOKAL:

“VOKAL is the program of choice for small rural libraries. This past year we moved to VOKAL and this year three of our neighbor libraries are signed up to switch to VOKAL. I feel like we are riding the top of a rapidly expanding wave. Best of all our patrons love us for giving them the option of tracking their reading history.”

Anne Dempsey, Director at the Hartford Library commented on the support she received from ByWater during the transition to Koha:

“The Hartford Library started using Koha with support from ByWater Solutions and VOKAL in December. With so much work to do: re-barcoding the whole collection and assigning new patron card numbers, we were feeling a bit overwhelmed. But the Koha system, supported by ByWater Solutions, set us at ease immediately. Koha is much more user friendly than our old system and by joining VOKAL it has increased the number of incoming ILL requests.”

MaryPat Larrabee at the St. Albans Free Library also commented on their decision to join VOKAL and go live on Koha:

“As the St. Albans Free Library looked to move forward in an ever changing library world, we knew one of our priorities was to take our automation system to a new level. As we examined the possibilities, we saw a growing number of Vermont libraries were using Koha through the VOKAL consortium. As we evaluated both costs and services, we decided that being part of VOKAL / Koha best suited our needs.

Because we opted to have ByWater migrate our data, we were fortunate to be able to communicate with the knowledgeable staff at ByWater. We were very fortunate to work with Joy Nelson, who was extremely knowledgeable about the migration process. Her familiarity with Follet, our former software, also helped her migrate our data successfully with minimal distractions.

Overall, we are very pleased with our transition into the Koha system and all it has to offer. We are learning more about the possibilities each day!”

About the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL):

The Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL), is a project of the Green Mountain Library Consortium dedicated to creating a shared catalog and Integrated Library System.

In 2007, the Stowe Free Library, the Carpenter-Carse Library (Hinesburg), and the Kimball Public Library (Randolph) joined with Sheila Kearns of the Vermont Department of Libraries to explore options for an ILS system to replace Follett. They decided on Koha, and in May of 2008, this team became VOKAL. For more information about VOKAL, please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/vokalvtpublic/home

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://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 the enterprise class open source library system, Koha. 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