Stephanie,

I was director of Harrison Township just before Melissa took over. Harrison Township was my introduction to Apollo. Up until I was at HTPL, I had never heard of Apollo. However, during my tenure at HTPL learned to love it! Apollo is extremely intuitive and easy to use. It is also in a constant state of evolution, adding new, useful features almost monthly.

Unlike other ILS systems, Biblionix, the company behind Apollo, is family owned by a father and two sons. One of the sons, Xan, is the creator of the system. Another son, Cameron, is the head of sales, and the father, Clark, is the business mind. Because Biblionix is a small business, the customer support is light years ahead of anything I have ever encountered in the ILS industry. Small problems are fixed in a few hours, medium-sized problems are fixed in a few days, and the really large issues are fixed in a few weeks.

When I was at Harrison Township, the one thing I didn't like about Apollo was the catalog display. I spoke with Biblionix about this toward the beginning of the pandemic, and they developed a new, alternate catalog display for VBDL, which I believe they may turn on for other clients as well. You may see our Apollo system here:

When I started at Van Buren District Library, we were using Verso. Verso has proven itself to be an extremely troubled system. For VBDL, which is a seven location, class V library system, MeLCat has NEVER worked correctly with Verso. Paging slips for incoming requests were routinely sent to the wrong location. For over four yeas we conducted monthly meetings with Auto-Graphics, and at the top of the agenda was always "is there a fix for MeLCat in sight?" We tried everything, being nice, offering to pay for the fix, threats, and in the end nothing motivated them to correct the issue. During one of our final meetings they said they didn't know if the issue could be fixed. That's not to mention their much touted upgrade from Verso version five to version six was a complete disaster that took the system backwards rather than forwards, and introduced a new degree of instability into the platform.

VBDL migrated to Apollo at the end of June. It took most of July to work out the migration issues, but I'm happy to say they are almost completely resolved. The Biblionix team has been truly outstanding and a pleasure to work with. Our main point of contact at Biblionix for the migration issues has been a technician named Chris Brailas, and he has been truly amazing. The president and co-owner of Biblionix, Clark Charbonnet, even traveled to VBDL HQ in mid-June to personally train the staff. I cannot say enough positive things about Biblionix. Apollo is a relatively inexpensive system. It costs moderately more than Verso, but unlike Verso, Apollo works as intended, and that is a feature that is truly priceless!!!

Stephanie, feel free to give me a call if you have further questions, 269-423-4771, or if you wish to discuss this further.

Best,