Nelsonville Library Chooses Koha

Nelsonville Library in Athens, Ohio, USA, have decided to switch to Koha. They have undertaken to fund some work on making Koha MARC compliant, which will make it even more attractive to the library community.

See Original Article
http://www.biblio-tech.com/btr11/S_PD.cfm?ArticleID=408&DO=A

The Nelsonville Public Library will migrate its existing server - currently running the Civica or "Spydus" system from Sanderson - to the open source Koha library system next summer and will contribute to the further development of the Koha project.

"We're going to move our library services onto Open Source platforms, culminating with the conversion of our existing server system to Koha." says Stephen Hedges of the Nelsonville Public Library (NPL). We want to use the Internet to offer some cutting edge information services to our library patrons, but we realized that this would require us to have control of our automation and database software. We needed the freedom to change things, to change the code if necessary, because the types of things we want to do are not going to appear in commercial library software for years."

Koha, being open source, provided the access that NPL required and the level of stability and functionality that they needed. NPL has committed to help support the development of Koha by funding some of the work on three specific projects. This support is seen as a wise investment, NPL expects to save as much money per year as they initially invest in Koha. More importantly, they will be able to offer what they consider to be "the best online services available anywhere in the world."

"NPL's involvement is a real validation of our model." says Pat Eyler, Kaitiaki (manager) of the Koha project. "We've got a solid base system. As people want to add onto it, they can make a small investment to fund the work (far less than they would for a comparable closed source solution) and everyone will benefit. I hope that we'll see other libraries pitching in too."