Labette Community College in Kansas Chooses Koha

The Labette Community College collection will be hosted off site at one of LibLime's secure data centers. The Library has also contracted with LibLime for data migration of their 22,500 bibliographic records, support, and training on their Koha system.

The Library has been operating with a homegrown system that is actually part of a campus-wide system developed by the now Director of IT, Anthony Rabig. Scotty Zollars, Director of Library Services, affectionately calls the system the 'Rabig 2000'.

"Although the Rabig 2000 does not have all of the bells and whistles of a commercial system, it is a very functional system and with Tony’s ability to make it do anything he wants, there is not a system out there that matches it--especially in regards to its report creating abilities," explains Scotty. "The downsides of the system are that the students do not find it user friendly and it is based on a green screen AS-400 system."

The AS 400 system will no longer be supported after December 2008 (though the Library can continue to access their data through mid 2009). This prompted the library to look for a system that closely resembles the Rabig 2000 in flexibility while offering an improved OPAC interface from the homegrown system.

"We found that with Koha and LibLime," continues Zollars.  "LibLime offered an easier way to adapt the system to fit the needs of the LCC Library. Also, the thought of having more control of the system and not having to go through as many layers to initiate changes was appealing to all concerned. Finally, the cost and the company’s ability to fit the migration into the college’s needed timeframe were the final deciding factors."

The Library staff are confident that Koha's interface will greatly appeal to students, and they are looking forward to Koha's powerful reporting functionality.
 

About Labette Community College

Labette Community College is one of 19 community colleges in the state of Kansas and one of six in the southeastern part of the state. It is well-known for providing transfer courses to those students going on to the state’s universities and for its excellent allied health programs of Nursing, Radiography and Respiratory Care, as well as its innovative Recording Arts Technologies programs.

 The library is staffed, in addition to Scotty Zollars, by two full-time, two part-time and two student assistants. It provides library services for the 1031 (FTE) students enrolled in the college’s main campus, satellite center, and extension sites, as well as the employees of the college and the citizens of the service area.

In addition to the main collection, the Library has some special collections, including a set of Carnegie books that was donated to the college with a large amount of prints in the 1930’s. The library also collects local history materials on southeast Kansas history, the history of Parsons, and the Katy Railroad. The Library houses the college’s archive of pictures, articles, pamphlets, publications and other items.

The LCC Library is located on the first floor of the main building on the Labette Community College main campus located in Parsons, Kansas.
The Library is open from 8 am to 9 pm M-Th and from 8 am to 4:30 pm on Friday on the main campus. The Library is available 24/7 through the library’s web site and databases with proxy server access.

About Koha

Since it was first put into production in early 2000, Koha has enabled new realities of open access, affordability, and free innovation for hundreds of libraries around the world. Koha has lived up to its name, which means ‘Gift’ in the Maori language of New Zealand. From the outset, many libraries understood the power of this gift. They downloaded it, they installed it, they changed it, and they contributed their solutions back to the library community.

Several companies around the world support Koha, providing libraries with a full array of services including installation, migration assistance, data integrity testing, staff training, software maintenance, support and customization. To learn more about what services are available visit http://koha.org/support/.

About Koha ZOOM

Koha ZOOM represents a generational leap in Koha's development. 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.

Press Contact:

Tina Burger

Vice President, Marketing LibLime

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tnb@liblime.com

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