CR2 Blog

5/8/2012
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Gerard Cottet Library at Salus University Goes Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and the U.S.’ forefront provider of Koha (www.koha-community.org) support, announced today that the Gerard Cottet Library at Salus University is now live on their installation of the Koha integrated library system.

The Gerard Cottet Library at Salus University houses approximately 21,000 texts and their customized catalog can be viewed at: http://libcat.salus.edu/.

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater Solutions, commented on ByWater Solutions’ newest partner library:

“We’re always happy to welcome a new partner at ByWater and Salus University is no exception. In choosing Koha as their ILS, Salus has shown a commitment to open source and forward thinking innovation that we love to see in academic libraries. We look forward to working closely with the staff of the library to make their student’s learning experience even better through the use of open source.”

About Salus University:

Established by the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, Salus University is a fully accredited academic institution offering professional and graduate degree programs in Optometry, Audiology, Physician Assistant studies, Public Health and Education and Rehabilitation for the Blind and Visually Impaired. For more information about Salus University, please visit: http://www.salus.edu

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:

ByWater Solutions is a full service, high quality support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their ILS than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in first rate Koha implementation and support with library systems of all sizes. Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions to support Koha not only lowers the cost of implementing and maintaining an ILS, but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit: http://bywatersolutions.com

Amigos Library Services will present a one day online conference “Access by Touch: Delivering Library Services Through Mobile Technologies” on Friday, June 8. The conference will cover a variety of topics, including developing a mobile website for your library, building a simple mobile-optimized web app, as well as practical usability checklists for mobile websites.

Corinne Hill will begin the conference by discussing re-imagining of the public library in a post-recession economy. She will examine delivering library services to a community that is becoming increasingly mobile and has an entirely new set of expectations.
Two concurrent sessions will run throughout the day. Among the scheduled sessions are:

• You’ve Got the Mobile Site for Your Library. Now What?, presented by Bohyun Kim of Florida International University Medical Library
• Building a Simple Mobile-optimized Web App Using the jQuery Mobile Framework, presented by Chad Mairn of St. Petersburg College
• Mobile Delivery of Content from a Provider’s Perspective, presented by Wanda Whitney of the National Library of Medicine
• Getting Started with Mobile Websites If You Don’t Know Code, presented by Carli Spina of the Harvard Law School Library
• Usable by Design: Practical Usability Checklist for Mobile Websites, presented by Tiffini Travis of California State University – Long Beach
• Mobile Technologies for Libraries, presented by Lori Barile of the Salve Regina University
• Developing a Mobile Website for Your Library, presented by Joel Shields of Washington Research Library Consortium

For the full schedule and sign up, go to http://www.amigos.org/mobile_tech. Early bird registration ends May 25, 2012.

About Amigos Library Services - For more than 35 years, Amigos Library Services has helped its members obtain affordable services and share library resources and knowledge. Amigos is one of the largest consortia of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the United States. Through membership in Amigos, libraries collectively gain access to the latest innovations and services in the library community; pursue opportunities for continuing professional education; leverage our buying power; and preserve the region’s rich cultural heritage.

BusinessCore™ E-book Subscription Collection Provides Access
to Thousands of E-book Titles for Corporate Learning and Research ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — May 7, 2012 — EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) has released its first e-book subscription collection for corporations. BusinessCore™ is designed to support the learning and research needs of business professionals. The collection is available as an annual subscription with unlimited access to the content.

The BusinessCore collection includes thousands of full text e-book titles from leading publishers. New titles will be added on a monthly basis. With BusinessCore, professionals are provided with an easy way to access e-books specific to their corporate research and learning needs. The collection provides a robust e-book experience that includes the ability to search alongside EBSCO’s industry-leading magazine and journal collections, create and add notes and bookmarks, as well as save research for future reference. Users can print, email and save chapters, or transfer them to a number of e-book readers and mobile devices including the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook and Sony Digital Book.

EBSCO Publishing Vice President of Product Management, Tad Goltra, says the new collection adds to the e-book options EBSCO is making available. “Customers now have the option to purchase subscription access, add to their permanent collection, or use a mixture of both to meet their business reference needs.”

BusinessCore
The BusinessCore collection offers more than 5,600 e-book titles and presents detailed, in-depth coverage of a wide variety of business topics including: leadership & management, marketing, project management, business communications, finance & accounting, human resources and sales. The collection also provides many authoritative titles on more specialized subjects such as: mergers & acquisitions, green business, strategic planning, negotiating, time management and corporate learning materials.

Annual subscription is the latest way EBSCO enables corporate libraries to add e-books to their collection. Corporate libraries or learning departments are also able to purchase titles to add to their permanent collection, lease titles they only need for a short time, and place other titles in a collection to be purchased only if/when users need them (Patron Driven Acquisition).

As with all e-books available from EBSCO, BusinessCore will integrate seamlessly with all EBSCOhost® content. The BusinessCore subscription collection may also be integrated into corporate portals and Intranets, learning management systems (LMSs), as well as mapped to an organization’s key competencies. Customers thus have easy access to relevant content wherever and whenever needed.

More information about eBook subscription collection is available at: www.ebscohost.com/ebooks.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator and e-book provider serving the content needs of corporations, associations and organizations of all types. EBSCO offers a suite of more than 350 full-text and secondary research databases and 300,000 e-books providing content from tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers. Databases provide information for areas ranging from research & development and corporate learning to departmental and industry-specific topics. EBSCO’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Business Source® Corporate Plus™, Business Book Summaries™, Learning Centers™, Business Basics™, Academic Search® R&D, Nonprofit Organization Reference Center™, and Health Library™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world, and may be integrated into corporate intranets, portals and learning management systems. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

~ Metadata from Millions of Open-Access Catalog Records from Harvard Library Available to EBSCO Discovery Service™ Users ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — May 4, 2012 — The Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset is now available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS), from EBSCO Publishing. EBSCO Discovery Service users are able to search millions of Harvard Library catalog records in the Base Index of EBSCO Discovery Service. The addition of these valuable resources from Harvard Library adds to the rapidly growing content available to EDS users.

Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset contains 12 million open-access catalog records from Harvard’s 73 libraries. The metadata in the Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset has been created, acquired and modified over decades and includes bibliographic information for books, videos, audio, images, manuscripts and maps. These unique records consist of information describing works—including creator, title, publisher, date, language, and subject headings—as well as other descriptors usually not available to end users.

Harvard’s collection is now visible to users of EDS along with a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content.

The EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers, representing far more content providers and publishers than any other discovery service.

EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

EBSCO Discovery Service is quickly becoming the discovery selection for many libraries (www.ebscohost.com/discovery/eds-news), and an obvious partner for content providers. Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost® platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching. There’s simply more to discover on the familiar EBSCOhost platform, and the same can be said for library administrators who can leverage their previous work with EBSCOadmin™.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the producer of EBSCOhost®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books. The company provides more than 350 databases and nearly 300,000 e-books. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.

###
For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

5/3/2012
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries Continues to Add Members

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. The project took flight in late 2007 with the installation of 3 stand-alone Koha instances to replace the libraries' legacy Follett systems and another 4 libraries automating into Koha through 2009.

In 2010, VOKAL launched Vermont's first union catalog hosted and supported by ByWater Solutions with the majority of the implementations being undertaken in-house by the talented and forward-thinking VOKAL implementation team made up of:

Amy Boisvert of the Jerico Town Library,
Wendy Hysko of the Brownell Library
Kim Peine, of the Dorothy Alling Library
Richard Pritsky, of the Carpenter Carse Library and the recipient of the 2010 Sarah Hagar Award for outstanding service and support to Vermont's libraries.

Since that time more than 30 libraries have been migrated to that system.

Despite the announcement of the VT State library going towards an Evergreen ILS sometime in 2013, VOKAL already has roughly 8 additional libraries slated to be migrated into their Koha union catalog by the end of 2012.

Mary Danko, Board President at Green Mountain Library Consortium and Library Director at Hartland Public Library, commented about the ability to accomplish the VOKAL initiative with so few resources:

"I think it is because we have such great volunteers and collaborative libraries. Our Implementation Team is wonderfully bright and they are also tons of fun to work with. By keeping the attitude light and fun any challenge can be met. Every VOKAL meeting I've attended I have left smiling.

Our libraries share their knowledge and expertise so generously with each other. Everyone is happy to have visitors come and see the system in action.

You know I often think of the risk these libraries took in going with such unknowns. Nobody had ever done an open source ILS in Vermont and nobody had every done a multiple town consortium catalog in Vermont. The first libraries were pioneers going into so much unknown territory, but they set out with passion and determination; and the journey still continues."

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater commented on VOKAL's success and ByWater's long standing relationship with them:

"The VOKAL project was one of our first partnerships as a new company on the ILS scene. The relationships we have formed with members of the VOKAL team are ones that will last a lifetime, and we look forward to every implementation meeting we attend.

The most amazing thing about the VOKAL project from our point of view is that these libraries had a need that was not being fulfilled, and instead of waiting for someone else to take care of that need they formed a bond with each other and did it for themselves. We love seeing this happen, as the ideas behind open source champions these very actions.

What the VOKAL implementation accomplished not only takes a huge amount of time and commitment, as these individuals took on the responsibilities of managing a consortium in addition to their day jobs, but it also takes courage and initiative. We are not at all surprised by the popularity of this group in Vermont, as people are naturally drawn to those who show the qualities demonstrated every day by this group."

About the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries:
In late 2007, the Stowe Free Library, the Carpenter Carse Library, and the Kimball Public Library met to explore a replacement ILS for Follett, the system that was then in use at all three libraries. After exploring many options, the group decided, along with Norwich Public Library, to replace their outdated standalone systems with Koha. Subsequently, Jericho Town Library, Warren Public Library, Joslin Memorial Library and Marlboro Elementary School automated their libraries with Koha, replacing their manual card catalogs. In May of 2008, the group chose VOKAL - the Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries - as the name for the group and the project.

VOKAL has since grown to over 35 libraries, all of whom are contributing funds to the consortium to provide additional design and programming services to create a tailored version of Koha — simple, sleek, easily viewable on dial-up. VOKAL has now implemented a consortium version of the ILS and has been migrating member libraries to the shared system. For more information about VOKAL, please visit: http://gmlc.wordpress.com/koha-project/

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:
ByWater Solutions is a full service, high quality support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their ILS than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in first rate Koha implementation and support with library systems of all sizes. Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions to support Koha not only lowers the cost of implementing and maintaining an ILS, but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit: http://bywatersolutions.com/