Austin Seminary and Seminary of the Southwest are Live on Koha with ByWater Support

by Jessie Zairo on Feb 4, 2024

ByWater Solutions, America’s forefront provider of Open Source library technology support, announced that the Austin Seminary and Seminary of the Southwest, both located in Austin, Texas, are now live on Koha ILS with ByWater Support. ByWater Solutions completed the migration of over 185,000 titles from the Voyager ILS product from ExLibris.

The Customized OPAC for Seminary of the Southwest can be viewed at https://librarycatalog.ssw.edu/.

Alison Poage, Bishop Harrison Library Director at Seminary of the Southwest, recently commented on the implementation.

It was a pleasure to migrate alongside our colleagues at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary to a system as easy to use as Koha. As the Access Services Librarian showed our student workers how to use Koha for circulation, the library was filled with the sound of resounding joy!”

The customized OPAC for Austin Seminary can be viewed at: https://librarycatalog.austinseminary.edu/.

Kristy Sorensen, Associate Dean, Library and Learning Services, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, also commented on the recent implementation of Koha.

We are excited to continue our shared ILS with the Seminary of the Southwest and to bring this new, fully featured, and intuitive online catalog to our students and other library patrons. Our migration to Koha was helped immensely by the team at Bywater and we look forward to having the support of Bywater and the Koha community as we grow into this new system."

About Seminary of the Southwest

Located in the heart of Austin, Texas, Seminary of the Southwest provides excellent residential formation for ordained ministry in the Episcopal tradition; offers a CACREP accredited master of clinical mental health counseling degree; offers professional master’s degrees to a range of lay professionals in a range of denominations and faith traditions; and serves the church through innovative models for local formation and ongoing training.

About Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip people for ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources for the nurture of the church; to practice and promote critical theological thought and research; to engage a range of voices and perspectives within and beyond the life of the seminary; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people. Located on a tree-filled campus in Austin, Texas, Austin Seminary engages with our community through master's programs, a Doctor of Ministry program, online certificate programs, and many opportunities for lifelong learning.

About ByWater Solutions

ByWater Solutions is a full service, high-quality Open Source support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their systems than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in the first-rate implementation and support services with library systems of all sizes for the Koha ILS, Aspen Discovery, Metabase, and Libki PC Management.

Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions not only lowers the cost of implementation and maintenance of OSS but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit https://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, circulation, management, and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies, HTML5, 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.

For More Information

Jessica Zairo
Director of Library Sales & Outreach
ByWater Solutions
bywatersolutions.com
Phone:(888)900-8944