April 29th 2010
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions’ Nicole C. Engard to Educate and Present at the SLA Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA.

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, is proud to announce that Nicole C. Engard, Director of Open Source Education for ByWater, will be presenting at this years SLA Conference in New Orleans, LA. on the power and value of open source and it’s communities

Nicole will be teaching a CE workshop, and giving a lecture on open source implementation for libraries.

CE Workshop:
Saturday, 06/12/2010 1:00PM – 5:00PM
The library community is a buzz about open source software (OSS). What will it mean to our libraries? How can it save us money and time? What will open source mean to our libraries? More flexibility and freedom! Why open source; because both the open source community and the library world live by the same rules and principles. This course will give you the facts about OSS by not only introducing you to what OSS is, how it is developed and maintained, and what it means for libraries, but also by providing attendees with a toolbox of over 50 OSS products to use in their libraries.

Open Source Lecture:
Monday, 6/14/2010 2:00PM-3:30PM
An introduction to open source software for libraries; what it is, what it does, how it came to be, and how you can take advantage of the many benefits it presents. It is more than just free software!

Nicole will also be promoting her upcoming book on open source software for libraries which is due out in July.

Nicole C. Engard has been a pillar of the Koha community since 2008 and acts as documentation manager for the project. In 2009 Nicole signed on with ByWater Solutions as Director of Open Source Education, and is well known outside of the Koha community as a speaker, teacher and writer. She has also been recognized as one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers for 2007.

About SLA 2010:
The Big Easy’s convivial environs are the perfect backdrop for the 2010 SLA Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO. You’ll enjoy endless opportunities to network with information professionals from around the world . . . participate in a dizzying array of professional development sessions featuring illustrious thought leaders . . . listen to captivating keynote speakers who will spark your imagination and color your conversation . . . and chat with exhibitors from top product and service providers and learn what’s hot and what’s essential. For more information, visit the SLA website.

About ByWater Solutions:
With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems such as Koha and Evergreen. 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: www.bywatersolutions.com

This was the first time that ByWater Solutions had sponsored an event for a Library Conference, and I’ll tell you one thing it won’t be our last. We Sponsored the trolley/shuttle for the transportation to the Grand Rapids Main Library reception and the Dine around for attendees to designated restaurants. There was a nice banner on the side of the Trolley that had the ByWater logo and the Growing Evergreen Conference logo. I think it was well received and I’m quite pleased with the service. It feels good to be on the other side of this because I remember as a librarian I always appreciate really cool sponsored services and definitely took advantage of them. So, It feels good.

I also enjoy these conferences because I get to meet many of the librarians who I’ve only meet in a digital fashion. For about 6 months now I’ve been chatting with an IRC nickname of Moodoepo and I had a chance to meet him face to face. That’s excellent and I found that he is much funnier in person *but still pretty lively and funny in digital form.” It’s always great to meet and talk with other developers face to face.

The Evergreen community seems to have a lot of positive momentum and this makes me really excited. Our Team that attended has picked up some excellent ideas for development and can’t wait to get home and have the time to code/develop.

-Brendan

Our closing keynote was Eric Lease Morgan – I’ve read a ton of his articles, but have never seen him in person.

Eric started with a history of him. He has been ‘kinda sorta’ writing code since 1976. While driving taxi after college, he discovered his first ‘itch.’ He wanted to know how much he was earning, so he wrote a computer program that gave him all kinds of crazy stats about how much he was making – like how much per mile. He also like astronomy and had an application for his calculator that let you find out where the moon was. He thought, this should be on a computer – and so he wrote a computer program that did the same thing. Eventually he even wrote an online catalog – he made it so that he could hand out a disk and people would know everything in his library.

Which brings us to open source. Open source is about community – if there is no community there is no software – there is no support! (There are some people that seem to forget this very important fact). Speaking of support, this is the biggest challenge to open source software.

Next up the OSS SWOT Analysis

Strengths:

• It benefits from the numbers game – chances are there is somebody out there with your particular interests. The internet makes that happen.
• There are plenty of choices – many people are trying to scratch an itch.

Weaknesses:

• Support is its biggest weakness.
• OSS requires specialized skills – not necessarily programmers – but usually a systems administrator type of person to configure the application.
• Institutions change slowly – change takes time and it often makes people nervous.

Opportunities:

• Very low barrier to entry – computer hardware is cheap and the software is ‘free’
• Only limited by one’s time, imagination and ability to think systematically. OSS is like a hunk of unshaped clay.

Threats:

• Established institutions – the status quo is threatened by OSS – FUD
• Past experience – the profession’s leadership liken OSS with the ‘homegrown’ systems of yesterday. Perceptions are slow to change.

Eric continued with his ideas on the Next Generation library catalogs. Library catalogs are and have been essentially inventory lists, but given the current environment, the problem to be solved is not find and access but use and understand. Are we about ‘here’s the book’? Is that what we’re about? What can do to take that one step further? We’ve used the computer to automate our process, but let’s use the computer to supplement who we are.

Let’s assume that content is available in digital form – this is increasingly becoming true. So once you have a book what do you do with it? Browse the TOC, check the index, put it under a wobbly chair, write in the book, analyze the content, read it…. You can read the book and get all of this – but we can provide a supplementary way of reading. So assuming our content is digital, we can take it and count the number of times a word appears in a book and then compare that to the number of times that word is mentioned in other books. So, then the book with the word in it more can be assumed to be more relevant than the other. (We’re not getting into numbers and statistics – which Eric likes – and which confuse the heck out of me).

Eric comes to the conclusion that that the availability of digital dull text provides a host of opportunities for libraries that goes beyond find and move towards use – services against text. The root of thees services grows on the ability to count the words in any set of documents.

So the next gen catalog is not just a finding mechanism but a way to understand the source material. We could add an analyze button to the OPAC and have it analyze the text saving the reader’s time by showing them if the book is actually relevant to their needs. You could add to that the ability to see how the word is used in the text. Click on the word, and then you see that word in context. This is possible using Eric’s Concordances tool.

Next, we break down the book into things like number of words instead of pages (like we catalog now) because the number of pages is ambiguous – you have no idea if it’s a long book because you don’t know how many images there or how big the font is. You can also see things like the grade range and the Flesch score (these of course are to be taken with a grain of sand because they don’t always give accurate information based on the individual person). You can see the example that Eric showed us on this record for Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Let’s imagine that this kind of metadata was in our catalog. You can search for short books for an 8th grader that has a very high great ideas (another example that Eric gave us) coefficient.

It is important to mention that Eric is not saying that this is the answer, but supplemental to what we’re already doing with our controlled vocabularies and traditional cataloging.

In the end, we have the power to do this more than Google does because we know our audience. We know our patrons.

Technorati Tags: evg10, open source, libraries

Stephen Putt and Daniel Wells of Hekman Library at Calvin College presented on their work for serials management in Evergreen.  They point out that for many libraries, serials is still a fairly major chunk of technical services, with lots of throughput, many repetitive tasks, and a lot of importance placed on fine-grained details.  Any serials workflow needs to plan for predictability, but allow for exceptions, which are frequent.  Their work with Evergreen aims to internalize and automate as much of the serials process as possible, so workers can focus on getting the issues processed and out to patrons.

They describe three levels of data in a serials model:

Evergreen Serials Model, taken from http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki

1. Metadata: the prediction patterns and holdings ranges in MFHD
2. Physical: where the materials actually are
3. Business:  acquisitions data

In the diagram, the tables in green are the serials tables, while the other colors represent parts of the core Evergreen database.  Links to Acquisitions are not shown, as this is concurrent development which will hopefully be merged together soon.

Most of the work so far as centered around the Metadata level.  The MARC Format for Holdings Data builds prediction patterns in as part of the standard, with field 853 including the caption and pattern.  There is generally one per bibliographic record, at least to start. The MARC 863 field holds instances of the pattern, either individual issues or ranges thereof.  Naturally there would be many of these per record. Other pairings exist for supplements and indexes, and non-standard holdings can be captured textually in field 866.

Each ‘piece’ of a serial has it’s own entry in the issuance table. This table is made up of the expected date of the issue, the actual received date, label info, claiming info, and something called ‘shelving units’. Shelving units are generic containers for issues, linking multiple issues to a single call number.  This can be configured to match the libraries’ practices:  If you don’t circulate serials, do it however you like. If you circulate current serials, assign different units for each current issue, and one or more for older issues.  If you circulate bound volumes, invert that. There are auto-population tools, Auto Per Issue and Auto Per Volume, to help streamline the workflow.

Again, as mentioned above, business information has been put on hold, so that it can be integrated into the work being done with Acquisitions.

The typical workflow for serials in Evergreen would be like thus:

1. Create the MFHD for the bibliographic record, with the prediction pattern.
2. Use pattern to generate the issuances.
3. Receive an issue as it comes in
4. GO TO 2

Exceptions to this would include placing claims, dealing with prediction pattern exceptions (like canceled issues) and the manual editing/management of shelving units; for example, some binders limit bound volumes to a certain thickness, forcing libraries to split up a volume into two items.

The presentation was followed by a live demo, and some Q&A.  One ‘missing’ function so far is any kind of ‘unreceiving’ of issues, though audience members noted that the MFHD could be edited directly in that case.  It was also noted that barcodes can be added on receipt of the issue, or auto-added if desired.

Dan Wells wants to point out that he is not a Serial Killer (despite the original intended name for this presentation).

Jed Moffit, Bill Erikson and Matt Carlson were up during our lunch to talk to us about the developments that were coming up from KCLS.

Jed says that we have to have something in the new developments that is better than ‘sucks less technology.’ He is hoping that these developments will be genuinely of value to all of us.

Matt was up next and started with a history. He said that 2009 was the year of circulation and user interfaces. 2010 however is the year of Acquisitions, Cataloging, Serials and the OPAC.

First up was the patron registration screen. They pulled all the fields into one form so you can work on it all on one page. They also added field specific help files (that can be added in by the librarian) and the ability to auto fill fields with city, state based on the zip. Other edits were a bit smaller, but made huge improvements like better use of the screen real estate and buttons for the really common tasks across the top. (as this was being shown) someone near me kept saying ‘wow’ – so for those who are using Evergreen now, these improvements are ‘wow-worthy’).

They’ve also added a staff client activity log that shows the last X transactions performed at a staff machine so you can see what the last 5 patrons who were taken care of are and at what station. This log is only for circulation actions.

There is a new patron merge interface where you can merge patrons together and it will keep everything related to the patron in the new merged record (bookbags, holds, etc).

Moving on to catalog items. They are working on a single page to get all the info about an item that you might need. Right now you have to go to different places to find it all.

As I mentioned in my Acquisitions summary, they are working on the connection to OCLC Connexion. So catalogers can edit records in Connexion and load them into Evergreen.

On the notices front, they will make it so that overdue notices and other notices are sent out automatically – and to give staff control over how that happens.

There were a bunch of other little updates that Bill ran through quickly, that you’ll just have to wait to see

Technorati Tags: evg10, open source, libraries

Bill Erickson started his Acquisitions roundup by showing us ‘Selection Lists’ – this is a concept I’m unfamiliar with. It’s basically a list of items you want to perform actions on. So you can create a list of items to order and then order from it – but you don’t have to – you can order items individually if you want.

From a bib record you can choose to ‘show/create orders’ and this will show you a history of all orders made for that item including costs. From here you can also add items to the selection list.

From the Z39.50 search you can search for items to order from records cataloged by others and add them to a selection list from there. You can also create a brief record of your own (not the traditional marc editor, just simple questions).

Next we saw the Acquisitions search functionality and it was pretty extensive which is awesome. You can search across all different kinds of objects using the search, so you can search for line items and invoices and selection lists all at once. You can even upload a file with a batch of ISBNs (or UPCs) and search for those items to see what you have or haven’t ordered yet (very very nifty).

This was followed by Patron Requests. Patrons can log in to the OPAC and then enter in what they know about the title they’re requesting and submit that to a staging area that the staff can see. From the request list patrons can put a hold on the item for when it arrives in the library. Should you want to reject a request you can define the reasons why you’re rejecting. There are also a number of new notifications that can be sent to the patron (patron request received, ordered, rejected, item received, etc).

For individual line items you can add notes so that you can communicate among you acq librarians. So if more than one librarian works on your acq process each can leave messages for the other should they need to.

When ordering you can edit fields related to the item you’re ordering in batch or line by line. So if you have 1 title that you want 5 copies of you’ll need to assign the call number and barcode for all 5 items but you can do this in one click instead of repeating 5 times. This also means that each copy you order can come from a different fund.

After you have you order ready you can create a Purchase Order. This process is also where you get to decide if you want to add ‘on order’ items to your catalog (this process will generate temp barcodes for each item). Once the PO is ‘activated’ it can be sent using EDI to the vendor and marks the funds as encumbered. You can also create print POs for vendors that you might have to send a paper PO to.

This next part confuses me – but seems like it might be cool if I can try it out and figure it out – when the vendor sends you the MARC file you can upload it into the acquisitions module and somehow it matches everything up and puts the full marc records into your catalog. The part I’m confused about is that I think Bill is saying that you can upload a marc file without having a PO in place and it will generate one for you … feel free to comment if you know more about this.

This is being tested/actively communicated with:

• Baker & tTaylor
• Ingram
• Brodart
• Midwest Tapes
• Book House
• Ebsco

And lots of others are on the radar (Bound to Stay Bound, Gale Cengage, Cholastic/Grolier, Blackwell, Random House, Quality Books, Couts, Library Bound, S&D Books, Raincoast, BWI, Midwest Library Service), but haven’t been tested yet. This is what makes EDI so hard, is configuring it to work with each vendor.

Next you need to receive items you can do this for a PO or a line item. You can also un-receive – aka roll back the whole process.

For the items you can’t receive you need to set up claim policies. To do this you create a policy and then you link a series of actions to that policy. For example you can have a print materials claim policy that sends an email after 10 days late and then again after 30 days late. You can also attach a policy to a vendor, but you can override this on a per line item basis if you want. These are not managed by EDI yet, but will be.

When you are receiving you can then update the items in batch to enter in the real barcodes where the temp barcodes were generated before. Next you might have to do some merging of the records you got from the vendor over your records. The merging offers all kinds of control over what fields you keep and which you don’t want. Along with this will come Connexion Integration.

After this you’re ready for Invoicing. I have to admit – here I got a little lost – which is probably because of my inexperience with working in acquisitions. Also, Bill ran out of time because there was so so so much cool stuff to show, so we didn’t get to see it all

Learn more by seeing the slides here.

Technorati Tags: evg10, open source, libraries

Three of the ByWater staff members are out of town this week learning about Evergreen at the Evergreen 2010 Conference. This morning’s keynote was Bill Ptacek from the King County Library System (KCLS) and his talk was entitled “From Singing the Blues to the Birth of Cool.”

KCLS serves 1.7 million people in the county where many large (many tech) companies live – Microsoft, Nintendo, Boeing, Amazon and Amgen. In addition to housing these major companies, King County is home to lots and lots of coffee (Starbucks on every corner). There are also 18 different school districts.

The library has a circulation of 21.3 million (2009), which makes them the third busiest library in the US. 25% of all of their use comes from items put on hold and have delivered to their local library. Because of this (or the holds happen because of this) KCLS has an amazing delivery system that gets the books where they need to be quickly. In addition, they have 9.85 million people coming into the library. People are coming to the library and want to spend time there! They also have 26.8 million hits to their library website and 88.6 million hits to the catalog. In short, people coming in from all avenues, but the biggest reason they use us is to get to our ‘stuff’ (and KCLS spends over $13 million a year on their collections).

KCLS has had several difference library systems before choosing Evergreen. So, why did they make that decision?

• What lead KCLS to look at open source?
  • The problem with the proprietary vendor was that they were selling ‘things.’ And the more ‘things’ they could sell the better. This means that the vendor was focused on selling and not the services – aka support. There were a number of things they wanted to do in their system that they couldn’t do. And they lived in a community with lots of high tech people saying ‘I could do this!’ but they couldn’t because they couldn’t get into the system to edit the code. Over time, after lots of discussions with the vendor always ending the same way, they decided to start looking at other alternatives. They hired people to do this for them and these people looked not only at libraries, they looked at companies that lent things. They came back and said that the library marketplace was terrible (shocker!). This company than suggested they take a look at what was happening with open source.
• Why is open source a good option?
  • It’s the way not only the pubic sector but the private sector is going. The environment is such that people are saying open source is the way to go. More importantly, it supports the integration and collaboration. Bill says, “We don’t want this to be an ESI project, but a library project.’ meaning that they want the library to drive the development and the direction that Evergreen. And KCLS can say this because open source supports a real changed model – one different from the one that libraries have been used to for years.
• Why Evergreen?
  • We liked the spirit of innovation and the spirit of community. It’s a product that’s driven by the people! There already was a community in place and it was a growing community (me: one thing that I always teach librarians to look for – an active community behind the open source application). And finally – it was cool!
• Why should KCLS take on this development work?
  • They are a separate tax district and they have a board that controls everything. Second, they have great funding (75% of the households use the library)! Finally, they have a history of innovation so this just makes sense. And while the library is well funded, the decision has never been about money.
• What are the future implications for technology in public libraries? Why is this different than before?
  • Because it is different! It’s the ability to control and manage this product. It means the flexibility to do what we need to do and respond appropriately to our patrons. “You shouldn’t have an PhD in III to be able to work with the system” (I love it!). The software has to be easier – it has to take less than 7 steps to delete a book. The patron catalog has to work and has to be integrated – it has to link up into all of the social networking stuff!

Bill concluded with a lot of ideas for the future. One that I totally agree with is that we need to get more eyes on the system. We need more librarians involved so that we can make the system better. We as librarians know what is good and what’s not good and we need to translate that knowledge to be available to our communities – and we have to use technology to get that knowledge out to the community, and this is the change.

Bill notes, “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the work done by those who went before us.”

Technorati Tags: evg10, open source, libraries

March 4, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
staff@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions Celebrates One Year of Providing Open Source Services to Libraries

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and official Koha support company, celebrated their one year anniversary for providing quality implementation and support services for open source ILS’s such as Koha and Evergreen.

Since its forming in 2009, ByWater Solutions’ management team has tripled in size, and includes Nicole C. Engard, Koha Documentation Manager and author of the popular blog, What I Learned Today, and Ian Walls, Vice President of the Koha users group KUDOS.

In addition to ByWater’s internal growth, the company now supports well over 40 libraries, including the Nelsonville Public Library of Athens, OH; the first to adopt Koha in the U.S. ByWater Solutions services libraries of all types, from public to corporate, and all sizes, from small town to consortiums. They have received an amazing response to the higher levels of service they strive to provide.

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater, comments on their first year in business: “I could not be happier with the direction our company is headed. We are grateful for the interest we have received from libraries, and are focusing on growing in a way that is commensurate with our ability to provide the personalized service and support our customers have come to expect from us. We have the right team on board to provide the best possible solution for libraries seeking an open source alternative for their ILS.”

About ByWater Solutions:
With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems. 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: www.bywatersolutions.com

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, circ, 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
www.koha-community.org

About Evergreen:
Evergreen is powerful, highly scalable open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites.

Since its debut in September 2006 as the software powering the 270-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 hundreds of libraries of every type—public, academic, special, and school media—in 12 states and 2 countries.
For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, please visit www.evergreen-ils.org.

January 22nd, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
staff@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions’ Nicole C Engard Presents at the Southwest Florida Library Network

ByWater Solutions’ Nicole C. Engard presented yesterday at a workshop for the Southwest Florida Library Network on “Libraries and Open Source: Freedom and Community.” The presentation not only introduced librarians to what open source is and what it means for libraries, but also provided attendees with links to a toolbox full of freely available open source products to use in their libraries. Nicole also had the chance to dispel some of the myths surrounding open source.

Jane Volker, ECHO Reference Librarian and former teacher was among the attendees of the presentation. When asked about the success of the talk, she stated:

“Nicole is definitely in the right job. She is a great teacher! I always get sleepy in these kinds of workshops but I never did in this class. Nicole was animated and touched on all our needs!”

Nicole C. Engard is known in the library world for her blog “What I Learned Today…” as well as her many publications including her book “Library Mashups.” Her experience with open source software started with the Koha ILS, for which she is now the Documentation Manager. She continues this role along with her work at ByWater.

About ByWater Solutions

With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized installation, data migration, configuration, hosting, training, support options and development for enterprise class open-source library systems such as Koha and Evergreen. Offering a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them. Check us out! http://www.bywatersolutions.com.

About SWFLN

SWFLN is a non-profit 501(c)3 multi-type library cooperative serving Charlotte, Collier, DeSoto, Glades, Hendry, Lee and Monroe Counties. Libraries of all types are SWFLN members – public libraries (including one tribal library system), academics, schools, and special libraries.

Their mission is to encourage interlibrary cooperation, to facilitate resource sharing and to provide opportunities for professional growth among all types of libraries and library staff. In support of that mission, SWFLN libraries have established this reciprocal borrowing project, an interlibrary loan and delivery system, and a strong program of cutting edge technology training.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA — August 13, 2009

Equinox Software Inc. and ByWater Solutions are pleased to announce a partnership that will help meet the demands of the rapidly-growing Evergreen community by providing crucial support for data migration services.

“Our partnership with ByWater Solutions developed from a wonderful problem: more migration work than we could handle internally,” said Brad LaJeunesse, Equinox company president. “We have dozens of libraries coming on board in the next year, and many more libraries clamoring to migrate to Evergreen. The relationship with this company of highly-skilled experts addresses a crucial bottleneck, enabling the Evergreen community to grow at its own pace—like a rocket.”

“An open source community not only consists of users, but also of vendors, and the cooperation and collaboration of both are equally vital,” said Brendan Gallagher, CEO and Director of Innovation for ByWater Solutions. Gallagher added, “Partnerships such as these are what makes the open source community so unique to foster growth and development for all involved. We foresee a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Equinox and are overjoyed to be on board.”

Brendan Gallagher, who has a masters degree in library science (MLS) from Southern Connecticut State University, has led and participated in many data migrations for both proprietary and open source library systems, and has contributed code, documentation, and friendly assistance to a variety of open source projects. ByWater Solutions has offices in both Santa Barbara, California and New Haven, Connecticut. Their web address is http://bywatersolutions.com.

About Evergreen

Evergreen is powerful, highly scalable open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites.

Since its debut in September 2006 as the software powering the 270-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 hundreds of libraries of every type—public, academic, special, and school media—in 12 states and 2 countries.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About ByWater Solutions LLC

With over a decade of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems such as Koha and Evergreen. With access to a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide comprehensive support for Evergreen, the consortial-quality, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox develops, supports, trains, migrates, integrates, and consults on Evergreen, and engages with the rapidly expanding Evergreen community. Equinox also offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.