Salinas Public Library Selects Koha ZOOM and YakPac

The Salinas Public Library houses over 225,000 volumes in English and Spanish and serves a population of 150,000. The Koha installation will be hosted off-site at one of LibLime's secure data centers. Salinas has also contracted with LibLime for data migration, support and training services on their Koha system.

"The library will be 100 years old in 2009, and Koha is seen as one of the major 'centennial events', " says Senior Librarian Steven Silveria.  "Our current system saw its last major upgrade in the mid-90's and provides minimal online access.  The library has chosen to go with Liblime and Koha because it makes sense financially, and because Koha provides a new level of library access to the Salinas community."

While cost was not the primary factor in choosing a new ILS "it quickly became clear that looking at an open-source product could provide added functionality and flexibility for less initial and ongoing costs," Steven adds.

Staff are excited too. "From the staff point of view, we are excited about the prospect of having a usable circulation interface that does not require knowing 'dot' commands and hidden menus," explains Steven. "Without exception, every group that has seen Koha has really liked the cover art and the ability to create and share book lists."

Salinas Public Library is well known for its cutting-edge approach to children's services. YakPac will offer the Library an innovative new 'kids only' OPAC experience for their youngest users. YakPac features a safe chat for kids and an integrated meta-search that retrieves 'kid safe' websites from a human-edited database.

About Salinas Public Library

The Salinas Public Library houses over 225,000 volumes in English and Spanish and serves a population of 150,000. The Library provides the only free Internet access in the area and is well known for its innovative youth programming such as poetry slams and is planning a digital and film-making creative lab for teens. The Library will celebrate its centennial in September 2009.

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 YakPac

Created by Index Data, YakPac achieves fun and functionality that go well beyond any other kid's OPAC currently available. YakPac's innovative 'safe chat'  was developed in response to analysis that indicated that kids were more likely to consult with peer groups to find information than use a standard library catalog. The chat even shows what other users are searching at the moment, and highlights interesting search terms in the chat window. YakPac features a fun interactive interface and tools for organization and self-expression like Book Shelves and Book Reviews.  YakPac can be adapted to work with any Integrated Library System.

To try out YakPac for yourself, visit the demo:
http://yakpac.liblime.com/

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.

Use of open source not only lowers the per-library cost of running software, it also empowers libraries with a higher level of control over customization and the overall direction of software development.

Press Contact:

Tina Burger

Vice President, Marketing LibLime

(888)Koha ILS (564-2457)

tnb@liblime.com