LinuxPlanet: Koha: A Library Checks Out Open Source

“It is, on initial sight, not exactly the kind of place where
you would start a revolution.

“A small town in southeastern Ohio, Nelsonville sits snug
alongside the Hocking River, with a population of about 6,000. It
is home to Hocking Colege, and the Nelsonville Public Library
(NPL). The NPL serves the entire county, not just Nelsonville, so
it has close to 36,000 patrons in Athens County, Ohio. But that’s
not all that interesting about the Nelsonville Public Library.
Inside its walls is an ongoing project that hopes to introduce an
open source library management system to the United States.

“And they’re building it from the ground up.

“Stephen Hedges is the Director of the NPL and is, by most
accounts, the big motivator behind a two-year project to create an
entire library management system from open source tools. Hedges
does not want to just slap some applications together, either. He
and a team of IT staffers from NPL are taking a very methodical
approach to this project and are quite willing to expend the time,
effort, and funding to get exactly what they want…”

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Story