Highland Park Public Library Chooses Koha ZOOM

The Highland Park Public Library's collection of 65,000 items will be hosted off-site at one of LibLime's secure data centers. The Library has also contracted with LibLime for data migration, support and training services on their Koha system.

The Highland Park Public Library chose Koha after an extensive review of the various proprietary and open-source options for its replacement ILS.

"Our current ILS is being discontinued and our servers are outdated," says the Library's director Jane Stanley.

"The flexibility of open source appealed to us as did the fact that it eliminates the problem of vendor lock-in," Jane explains. "Marketplace issues and recent developments involving open-source ILSs have come together to create a climate that makes switching to an open-source ILS a viable option for a small public library like ours."

Jane believes the open-source development model can now offer more responsive development cycles than the traditional ILS vendor: "We felt that the traditional vendors were not making decisions that were in our library’s best interest when it came to product roadmaps and staffing," says Jane.

"Advances in Internet and communications technology now enable developers around the world to efficiently collaborate on an open-source ILS. Because the building blocks are readily available, open-source developers don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create new functionality," Jane continues.

"Let's not leave unsaid the fact that small libraries are struggling with difficult budget issues like never before," she concludes. "Being able to turn to LibLime to install, host and maintain the Koha system makes a lot of sense financially in these difficult times."

About Highland Park Public Library

The Highland Park Public Library serves a diverse community of 14,000 residents in 2 square miles in central NJ right across the Raritan River from New Brunswick, the home of Rutgers University. It is a walking community and the library is very active, with a collection size of 65,000 that circulated over 193,000 times in 2007. With regular exhibits of local artists’ works, author talks, musical performances and well attended poetry, film and technology series, the library is the community’s cultural and learning center. It serves all age groups in a warm environment with a fireplace and comfortable seating areas ideal for curling up with a good book or a friendly conversation.

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:

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.

Press Contact:

Tina Burger
Vice President, Marketing LibLime
(888)Koha ILS (564-2457)
tnb@liblime.com

LibLime and the LibLime logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of LibLime. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Sales:

E-mail: sales@liblime.com

Phone: (888) Koha ILS (564-2457)