Duluth, Ga., July 11, 2018: Equinox is pleased to announce the successful migration of Northwestern Michigan College into the open source community with their deployment of Koha.

Northwestern Michigan College was founded in 1951 out of a desire to have the benefits of a higher education brought to the region. They were the first comprehensive community college chartered in the State of Michigan.

Their migration involved 36,414 bibliographic records and 12,888 patrons at the college. Equinox provided implementation and data services in addition to Koha support, hosting, and auxiliary services. The project also included Equinox’s training services.

“We're so excited to be joining the open ILS community with our implementation of Koha,” said Joelle Hannert, library technical services coordinator at Northwestern Michigan College. “The spirit of sharing involved in this community is so much more in line with how we do things in libraries. The team at Equinox have been wonderful in every step of our migration. They've been patient, responsive, and careful in responding to questions and working with our data. Their helpful, can-do attitude has been a breath of fresh air. The customization options in Koha are awesome, and Equinox staff have been great in helping us understand how they work, so we're empowered to tailor our ILS to our specific needs.”

Founded in 1999 Koha is the first free and open source library automation package. Equinox's team includes long-standing of Koha developers.

“Working with Northwestern Michigan College on their migration to Koha has been a lot of fun,” said Jason Etheridge, senior developer at Equinox. “They've been really exercising the customization opportunities you find with open source software and I can't wait to see what they do next."

To learn more about Koha and the expert services Equinox has to offer please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/.

About Equinox Open Library Initiative
Equinox Open Library Initiative Inc. is a nonprofit company engaging in literary, charitable, and educational endeavors serving cultural and knowledge institutions. As the successor to Equinox Software, Inc., the Initiative carries forward a decade of service and experience with Evergreen and other open source library software. At Equinox OLI we help you empower your library with open source technologies.

About Koha
Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual-database design (search engine and RDBMS) built to be compliant with library standards. Koha’s OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are free to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development services. For more information on Koha, please visit http://koha-community.org.