Athens, OH--September 29, 2008-- LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that Big Country Library System (BCLS) has selected a Koha ZOOM hosted system for their next integrated library system and union catalog.
Big Country Library System (BCLS) is a 39-member regional library system. Geographically, BCLS is the largest regional system in Texas, and at 34,127 square miles, is larger than the state of South Carolina. Eleven libraries will migrate to Koha during 2009, with additional libraries joining over the next 2 years.
The Koha installation will be hosted off-site at one of LibLime's secure data centers. BCLS has also contracted with LibLime for data migration of their 288,600 items, support and training services.
"We were looking for an ILS that our libraries would be able to sustain over the long-term," says John Pecoraro, Coordinator of the Big Country Library System.
Koha's open-source solution was the best match for us to keep ongoing costs as low as possible. We also wanted a fully-hosted ILS. LibLime was able to give us what we needed.
John continues: "Our libraries' staffs are most excited about the fact that the ILS will be hosted by LibLime, which will take the care for upkeep of dedicated servers and worry about system backups away from them. Patrons will be excited about the availability of the catalog 24/7 on the Web."
Big Country Library System is the 9th consortium to choose a Koha solution through LibLime.
About Big Country Library System
Big Country Library System (BCLS) is one of 10 regional systems comprising the Texas State Library System, a cooperative program designed to help meet the informational, educational, and recreational needs of Texans. Since no library has all the resources necessary to meet all the needs of all the people, only a cooperative effort can assure Texans access to needed library materials and services.
BCLS is funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. BCLS serves public libraries in a 32-county, mostly rural area of West Central Texas. Of the 39 member libraries, 34 serve populations of less than 10,000, and 24 serve populations of less than 5,000.
About Koha ZOOM
Koha ZOOM is the next-generation release of the award-winning Koha open-source integrated library system. Notably, it includes a powerful search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM's search engine can read structured records in practically any input format (e.g., email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries. It supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records) as well as incremental, safe database updates on live systems.
To try out Koha ZOOM for yourself, visit LibLime's demos: http://liblime.com/demos
About LibLime
LibLime is the global leader in open-source solutions for libraries, with a mission to make open source accessible to libraries. Rather than sell software licenses for static, hard-to-customize software products, LibLime educates libraries about the benefits of open source, enabling them to make choices about how best to provide their communities and staff with better technology services. LibLime then facilitates implementation of open-source in libraries by providing outstanding development, customization, support and training solutions--solutions tailored to each library's needs. For more information, see http://liblime.com.
