With over two million materials circulated annually, Geauga County Public Library boasts the highest per capita circulation in Ohio. The county library system has four large community libraries, two library stations and Ohio's most well-used bookmobile.

"LibLime is making the move to open-source software a more secure proposition," explains Deborah O'Connor, Director of Geauga County Public Library. "With a firm such as Liblime to provide technical support, moving to open source will not require the library to have programmers in its Information Technology Department."

O'Connor explains four reasons Geauga chose Koha as their next ILS: philosophy, Koha ZOOM's superior OPAC technologies, cost, and the ability to implement open source through LibLime even though they have no programmers on staff.

"The collaborative nature of open source is akin to the library's philosophy of sharing. Open source software is a natural for entities that are in the sharing business, such as public libraries," says O'Connor. Geauga plans to give back to the Koha community by sponsoring future development that other libraries can benefit from.

Geauga is looking forward to the upgrade in services that Koha will offer its staff and patrons. They are especially excited about Koha's outstanding public access catalog. "The Amazon-type look of the public access catalog is very exciting to our staff and Library Board," says Deborah. "Item covers and "look inside" are also very exciting. On the purely staff side, we are thrilled to be able to place multiple items on hold for a patron with just one click."

Geauga has selected LibLime's turnkey Koha ZOOM Appliance solution together with ongoing annual support and maintenance. Geauga is slated to go live in early 2008.

About Geauga County Public Library

Located east of Cleveland, Ohio, Geauga is a diverse county with upscale bedroom communities on its west side and a large Amish population in the east. Geauga County Public Library is a county library system with four large community libraries, two library stations and Ohio's most well used bookmobile. The library circulates over 2,100,000 items per year with about 600,000 items in its collection.

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.