Whenever I introduce some new program, service, collection, or web site feature, I have a small worry that it will backfire. If I were in a large system, I'd do surveys and interviews and find out before I launched that it would be well received. Well, I'm not in a big system, so I just do it.

Laptop check out? Went to Wal-mart, bought two laptops and started checking them out for in-house use after they were configured with DeepFreeze.

NExpress? The Board said, "go for it" and off we went.

Twitter on the Web site? Introduced that last Friday for grins and giggles. We'll see how it works out, for now it does no harm.

But for several reasons, I had reservations about switching from our Kansas City Library Consortium to NExpress-only consortium with Koha--not so much because the interface was different, but because we'll be losing access to the Kansas City Public Library's huge, massive, gory, perverted, valuable collection and North Kansas City's impressive graphic novel collection (courtesy of Mickey Coalwell, currently at NEKLS). I think we will have to sell Koha, we will need to promote the New Tonganoxie's patronsand Exciting seamless patron-initiated interlibrary loan features that allow patrons to request materials from ANY library in Kansas, including Wichita, Kansas City (KS) Public, Topeka & Shawnee County Public and Johnson County.

So, in preparation for the sales pitch, I came up with a list:

Why my patrons should love Koha ZOOM

1. It's web based.
2. The simple search box can be added to our Web site, making it a one-step process to find a book.
3. Patrons can keep track of what they've checked out - they can choose to keep their circulation history information. No more initials in the books, although I think my westerns will always be 'branded' by my manly readers.
4. Everyone in the NExpress consortium will open up their entire collections - so we'll have access to at least 23 more copies of best sellers and can get to Nortonville's video game collection.
5. Search results can be sorted by popularity, author, title, call number, publication date or acquisition date. With Sirsi, the hit list is organized based on the last time a bibliographic record was edited. That just makes absolutely no sense to me.
6. There are pictures and reader reviews from Amazon.com, complete with the star rating system.
7. Patrons can leave comments!
8. There are plot descriptions.
9. There will be seamless connections to the Kansas Library Catalog for patron-initiated ILL's.
10. With the "Editions" tab, you can find the title you want and then pick how you want it - audio, large print, mass market paper back, or hard cover.

Unrelated - Crawford County Federated Library System has Kyle. I heard about Kyle at the User's Group meeting at PLA in Minneapolis and was jealous. How nice would it be to have your own PERL programming genius on staff when you decide to switch your library to open source? I found Kyle's Web site. I want that LibKi computer management program. I bet it works better than CybraryN.

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