by Kalleen Marquise on Jan 5, 2022

A note from Brendan Gallagher, CEO and Nate Curulla, CRO:

Happy New Year from all of us at ByWater!

2021 was another historic year thanks to our partner’s support and our team’s unwavering dedication to libraries. Although our partner libraries and colleagues faced continued challenges, we are impressed to see the perseverance exhibited by those continuing to struggle with the effects of the pandemic. We are also excited to see the innovative ways libraries are evolving to continue to provide services to their communities regardless of the difficulties inherent as of late. The dedicated and wonderful team here at ByWater showed their continued empathy and caring while responding to issues brought to us and while bringing new libraries up on Koha, Aspen, Libki and Coral. We plan on expanding this team even more in 2022!

This year brought several improvements to ByWater which will ensure that the products we support continue to be reliable and secure. Our entire server infrastructure got a major upgrade earlier this year which brings improved performance and security to all of our hosted partners as well as further streamlined and simplified the upgrade process for our Koha libraries. We are also working toward several security certifications and frameworks to extend our already robust procedures. ByWater continues to invest in the ongoing services and functionality of the products we support and we have brought on nine new team members in 2021 with plans to grow with three more ByWaterians in early 2022. It has always been a very important focus for us to match our internal growth with our external success.

Both Koha and Aspen Discovery have seen exceptional growth, not only in new library adoption but also in community expansion and functionality enhancements. 145 new library sites adopted Koha in 2021 and 357 sites signed on for Aspen! Multiple new support companies have joined in the Aspen Community which is exciting to see for this relatively new product. The Libki Kiosk and Print Management system has also seen an increased adoption thanks to the new features added with its print management capabilities. Finally, ByWater has been working on further connectivity between the CORAL ERM and Koha, setting the stage for a complete open source solution, all under one roof!

While we were not able to see many of our partners in person this year we look forward to the possibility of in-person conferences and more onsite trainings being a reality soon. We miss seeing the librarians we work with on a daily basis! Thank you everyone for a great year and we will continue to provide the levels of support and functionally you have come to expect from ByWater in 2022 and beyond!!

Read the full end of the year report here.