2018 ByWater Solutions Summary Year in Review

by Brendan Gallagher on Jan 24, 2019

2018 was an exciting year for ByWater and Koha. We are seeing a trend of larger libraries utilizing Koha in both the public and academic markets, which is really great for the continued improvements in software and community for Koha. In early 2018, ByWater announced the go live of Virginia Tech University Libraries, which was the first R1 ARL to adopt Koha in the United States. The migration took place over the course of a 4 month timeline and the result was extremely successful. ByWater also brought two large consortiums up on Koha during 2018, both of which are live and loving the system and support they get from ByWater.

ByWater added 4 additional members to the team, held 4 Koha Summits, attended 16 conferences, and continued to add libraries to the Koha Klassmates program, which has grown to support 40 library schools to date. ByWater also brought a number of customers up on the Coral ERM and announced print management functionality for the Libki Open Source PC Management system.

The Koha software continued to grow in the 2018 calendar year as well, with the addition of integrated e-book APIs within the catalog which allow customers to circulate e-books for Overdrive, Recorded Books and 3M Bibliotheca directly through the catalog. Additional features included the a complete re-design of the OPAC, the integration of Coral into the Acquisitions Module, the first steps of the Elastic Search rollout, plus much more.

ByWater also announced a partnership with EBSCO to implement and support the Folio LSP, of which the first customers are planned to go live in late 2019 and early 2020.