Continuation of Jed Moffitt's pre-launch updates for staff at KCLS.

Attached is the fifth update in this series...

 

The recorded version of the Evergreen episode of the FLOSS Weekly show was released over the weekend. I'm happy to say that Lynn watched it without looking too pained at any given point, and the Evergreen project has already had several responses to our plea for assistance so far, particularly on the packaging front, which is fantastic! Just having one more skilled helping hand makes all the preparation for and stress about the show worth it.

Several points that amused me about the show as I glanced over Lynn's shoulder:

• In Randal's introduction, he said that I "worked for Coffee|Code", full-stop. Aside to Leila Wallenius, the University Librarian of Laurentian University: no, there's nothing I need to tell you, I'm still a full-time employee at the University and I'm not planning on going anywhere! (That said, Coffee|Code Consulting is a registered sole proprietorship that provides small blocks of consulting services for Evergreen software in my spare time).
• For the first half of the show, my affiliation was shown as the (misspelled) http://coffecode.net. So of course I immediately ran out and bought that domain.
• Co-host Dan Lynch expressed a wish that his own show, Linux Outlaws, had a guest list like FLOSS Weekly. Oddly enough, some time ago when the subject of librarians and their fanatical devotion to open access to information came up on Linux Outlaws, I had submitted a feedback form on their site saying (essentially) "hey, if you want to talk to a Linux-loving free software-developing librarian some time, I'm around..." but I think that comment went into the ether.

If I ever do a video interview like this again, I'm going to try to:

• Prop my laptop up on a couple of LCSH books or attach a separate web cam at a proper height so it doesn't appear that I'm looking down on the viewer.
• Cut down on the "uhm"s and "ahh"s and stare a bit more robotically at the camera instead of rolling my eyes as I rack my brains to come up with an answer
• Stop rambling and trust the interviewers to take the show in the direction that their audience will be interested in instead of trying to jam in points that I think are important or interesting
• Ensure that my erstwhile partner in crime has a better Internet connection

Continuation of Jed Moffitt's pre-launch updates for staff at KCLS.

Attached is the fourth update in this series...

 

Continuation of Jed Moffitt's pre-launch updates to staff at KCLS

Attached is the third update in this series...

Continuation of Jed Moffitt's Pre-Launch Updates for Staff at KCLS.

Attached is the second update in this series...

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Pennsylvania Moves Toward Statewide Open Source Library System Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - August 26, 2010 - HSLC/Access PA, managers of the Access PA Union Catalog and interlibrary loan systems, has announced its intention to migrate an initial group of public libraries to an Evergreen open source integrated library system beginning in 2010. This group of public libraries currently shares an Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Millennium library system managed by HSLC in Philadelphia. HSLC has signed a contract with Equinox (original developers of the Evergreen software) for data enhancement and training services, and has received letters of intent from 39 public and 8 school libraries that plan to participate in the project.

HSLC is developing the new Evergreen system for public libraries in close coordination with the work of the Statewide Integrated Library System (ILS) Task Force convened by Pennsylvania's Office of Commonwealth Libraries. The ILS Task Force will also assist in establishing a not-for-profit organization to oversee the project by the end of 2010. HSLC will continue to maintain the Access PA Union catalog of 3000 libraries' holdings based on Innovative Interface's INN-Reach product.

While the initial group of libraries to migrate to Evergreen will be limited to public libraries currently participating in the HSLC Millennium system, the new organization that will oversee the statewide system will accept applications from additional libraries in 2011. A separate instance of the Evergreen system is being planned for school libraries.

The new shared system, which will utilize virtualized servers and storage, is designed to be highly fault tolerant and reliable. It will be hosted at a commercial hosting facility in Philadelphia that offers redundant network connections and diesel generated back-up power.

The integrated library system will also include a separate discovery interface based on VuFind open source software developed at Villanova University. The VuFind discovery interface integrates a modern, easy to use searching interface with social software functionality. It also allows libraries to customize and integrate the discovery layer with their websites.

Contact:

Joseph C. Scorza

Executive Director

HSLC/Access PA

3600 Market Street, Suite 550

Philadelphia, PA 19104-2646

215-222-1532

scorza@hslc.org

EG Web Team 8/18/10 Meeting Minutes

Participants:  Jim Craner (project leader), Amy Terlaga, Lori Ayre, June Rayner, Anoop Atre, Chris Sharp, Elizabeth McKinney, Jason Etheridge, Dan Scott

Goal of today's meeting was to meet with those who had or currently have responsibility for Evergreen website.

Jason: Evergreen-ils.org established early on like any other open source software website with a mailing list, down load links, documentation, etc.

read more

The Lebanon Schools are up and running with Evergreen. Lebanon Middle School and Lyman Memorial High School went live yesterday. The elementary school will be up with their new ILS on Monday.

Lebanon's move to Evergreen has been fantastic. The three librarians are engaged, supportive, and fun to work with. The libraries are popular spots for the students to spend time in. In short, the Lebanon school libraries are a vibrant new member of the Evergreen community.

The students know there's a new system and a few searched for books on the first day of school. Instruction begins in a week or two for the middle school students. Yesterday, the fifth graders had an introduction to the library and lined up enthusiastically to check out some fun reading material.

Lebanon Schools are Bibliomation's first Evergreen schools and we're off to a great start! The planned enhancements will only make next year even better - we can't wait!

King County Library System, in Washington state, goes live on Evergreen at the end of September. Check out this video overview of their new, whiz-bang Evergreen web catalog:

http://rscel.evergreen-ils.org/node/1480

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA- August 26, 2010

The American Council of Learned Societies' Humanities E-Book has gone live with Koha. Equinox Software is providing hosting services and performed the initial data migration.

Eileen Gardiner, Director of ACLS Humanities E-Book, says, "ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) needed a secure and friendly environment in which to create and archive the MARC records that it distributes for its collection. The team at Equinox made some sound suggestions, and we were able to get our system up and running in just days. Koha turned out to be an ideal solution for HEB, and Equinox made it all happen quickly and easily."

Galen Charlton, VP for Data Services at Equinox, says, "I am pleased to welcome ACLS to the Koha community, and I take special note that they will be using Koha not as a traditional library but in support of their e-book MARC record distribution service. The flexibility of Koha and other open-source integrated library systems means that they are not just for physical libraries checking out physical books, but can be used and grow to support the virtual libraries of the world."

About ACLS Humanities E-Book

Humanities E-Book (HEB) is a digital collection of nearly 2,800 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twenty learned societies, nearly 100 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable MARC records. HEB is available on- and off-campus through standard web browsers.

About Koha

Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual database design (text based and RDBMS) built to be library standards compliant. Koha's OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are free to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development service.

For more information on Koha, please visit http://koha-community.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 770-709-5571

Last week, I started my summer vacation with a weekend at a friend's cottage. By Tuesday I was deeply engrossed in some Evergreen enhancement work for the International Institute of Social History. I'm building an authorities management user interface that properly exposes Evergreen's powerful authority support in the 2.0 release: browsing authority lists, editing authorities and having the updates ripple through to the bibliographic records with controlled fields, merging and deleting authorities... here's a screenshot of the interface in progress: . The numbers represent the number of bibliographic records linked to each authority record. These are still early days, but I think there are some cataloguers that are going to be pretty excited about this functionality when they get their hands on it.

This week, I'm on location in the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island doing some Evergreen consulting work for them. The good people at UPEI have put my family and I up in a nice cottage on the island, so I'm toiling away at improving Evergreen during the day while my family explores the island. Melissa Belvadi and Grant Johnson have put together a list of pain points that they would like me to address that happen to mesh nicely with general pain points that have come up over the years on the Evergreen mailing lists. My first priority has been to make working with spine labels a little less aggravating. I'm happy to say that after a day and a half, I've been able to teach the spine label editor how to (*gasp*) move up and down with the arrow keys and (*ooh-ahh*) insert and delete new lines and (*w00t*) have the spine label defaults come from library settings that only have to be set once instead of being individually set by each cataloguer. Oh, and I've added font size, font weight, and font family to those settings so that you can have 20 pt. bold Helvetica spine labels if you want them.

All of this code is being committed to Evergreen trunk as I hit functionality milestones; much of the authority work has made its way into the Evergreen 2.0 alpha release that was cut on Monday (although not yet announced officially). On Monday I also cut the OpenSRF 1.6.0-alpha release and uploaded a virtual image built on Debian Squeeze reflecting the OpenSRF/Evergreen alpha releases to http://evergreen-ils.org/~denials/Evergreen_trunk_2010_08_23.zip (note that it's 500 MB, and does not come with X installed, so it's primarily aimed at users that are already familiar with Evergreen and just want to see the new stuff without having to go through the entire install process).

I did take some time off of Evergreen development this afternoon, as I was honoured to be one of the two guests on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. Mike Rylander and I were there to discuss Evergreen with the hosts, Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch. Unfortunately for Mike, me, and the audience, Mike's Skype connection kept dropping and I had to do the bulk of the talking. Despite missing the contributions from Mike's massive brain, I'm told that the show went well. So if you're interested in hearing a bit about Evergreen and why I do what I do, keep an eye open for the interview at http://twit.tv/floss132 - it should be edited and online by Friday, August 27th at the latest. I tried not to swear too often so they wouldn't have to do much editing work - heh.

Finally, somewhere in there I celebrated another birthday. Oh yeah! Older? Yes! Wiser? Probably not.

Starting July 23, 2010, Jed Moffitt (IT Services Director at KCLS) began sending out staff emails to keep people informed of progress being made in the move toward Evergreen.

Attached is the first update in this series...

 

EG Web Team 8/18/10 Meeting Minutes

Participants: Jim Craner (project leader), Amy Terlaga, Lori Ayre, June Rayner, Anoop Atre, Chris Sharp, Elizabeth McKinney, Jason Etheridge, Dan Scott

Goal was to meet with those who had or currently have responsibility for Evergreen website.

Jason: Evergreen-ils.org established early on like any other open source software website with a mailing list, down load links, documentation, etc.

read more

KCLS put together a screencast for their staff introducing the new patron interface for their Evergreen system.  I'd say "OPAC" but it is much more than simply an OPAC.  

Take a peek:  http://www.kcls.org/evergreenopac/EvergreenOPACDemo.swf

read more

Automatic client updates may soon be coming to Evergreen thanks to the work of MVLC Assistant Network Administrator Thomas Berezansky. The Staff Client Build/Update Enhancement was committed yesterday to trunk, the version of Evergreen where any development is added and tested before it is incorporated into a stable release.

read more

The Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative (MassLNC) is inviting vendors and developers to respond to a Request for Quotes (RFQ) to develop enhancements for the Evergreen ILS.

The RFQ is available on the MassLNC site at http://masslnc.org. The RFQ contains eight enhancement projects for Evergreen, but we invite respondents to provide quotes for one or any number of the projects outlined in the document.

All quotes should be submitted to the MassLNC office by 5 p.m. Wednesday, September 22, 2010. 

read more

The Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative is inviting vendors and developers to respond to a Request for Quotes (RFQ) to develop enhancements for the Evergreen ILS. The RFQ contains eight enhancement projects for Evergreen, but we invite respondents to provide quotes for one or any number of the projects outlined in the document.

read more

The networks participating in the MassLNC project have been making steady progress in identifying development needs for Evergreen. After identifying several top priorties for enhancements based on our testing of Evergreen and on ideas we have received from member libraries, MassLNC is ready to issue its first RFQ for development services. Several enhancements will be included in the RFQ.

read more

MassLNC is participating in its first development partnership for the Evergreen Integrated Library System. We will be jointly funding development for end-of-semester and fixed due dates. Bibliomation, Inc. in Connecticut is the lead on this project, and three others partners are involved in the project as well.

read more

It's now official - we have just signed off on the Equinox development quote for our Evergreen K-12 schools due date functionality.

This functionality will give all Evergreen academic and K-12 school libraries the ability to set end-of-semester due dates for their students. In addition it will provide the ability to set hard due dates for faculty.

ESI hopes to have development completed for us to test by the end of this calendar year. Bibliomation will have the Lebanon Schools live on Evergreen by the end of this month. If all goes well, the Lebanon Schools will be able to use this new functionality in June 2011.

Bibliomation has partnered with the following Evergreen sites on this development project:

Project Conifer (Ontario, Canada)
Sage Library System (Oregon)
Kirtland Community College (Michigan)
MassLNC (Massachusetts)

We'd like to publicly thank our development partners for their cooperation. We could not have moved forward with this project without them!

If you have any questions about this Evergreen development project, you can contact me at terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.

--Amy
----------------
Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation, inc.

 A new state-of-the-art resource sharing software has been in the works at Equinox(with sponsorship from ohioNET) for some time now.  And while it isn't ready for download, it did cross a new threshold recently.  As of August 2, 2010, FulfILLmentwas established as its own open source project (as opposed to a piece of Evergreen).

This is especially FANTASTIC news for everyone who isn't on Evergreen where the resource-sharing software options are....well, they stink frankly.  Current offerings have three problems:

1. work well on one ILS but not another
2. too expensive
3. too labor-intensive for staff.

Most often, it's a three strikes situation.

read more

Evergreen certainly allows a lot of copy data to be displayed in one place, but what if you have a smaller collection and only a few copies of most titles.  That leaves you with a bunch of zeros for each status.   Here at GRPL we’ve decided to print a line for each and every copy, spelling out the current status, due date (if any), and call number for each.

Instead of trying to describe what we’ve done, I’ve uploaded a copy of the basic changes to the ILS-Contrib repository.  Here you can see the 4 files modified to make this happen.  I’ve tried to leave much of the old content in place in the javascript just commented out, so you can see where the changes reside, but that wasn’t real practical in the .xml.

To really make this useful, we’ve also included an external javascript tool that allows us to sort each column on demand.  By making these functions available, you need only apply the proper class to a table header and viola, sort away…

Did you know that Evergreen's "shelving locations" are synonymous with Horizon's "collection codes?"  

Did you know that Evergreen's "circulation identifiers" are synonymous with Horizon's "itypes?"

I learned this from the attached document, contributed by Bibliomation.  It documents their system-wide loan policy recommendations.  Check it out, they got public, academic and school libraries to agree on a consistent loan periods.  Awesome!

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Mary White, Library Director

Howe Library

603-640-3251

mary.h.white@thehowe.org

Library Moves to Open-Source System to Cut Costs, Increase Flexibility

Hanover, NH--In a technology move designed to cut taxpayer costs, Howe Library is pleased to announce it has moved its entire bibliographic catalog and circulation system to Evergreen, an open-source integrated library system used by hundreds of libraries nationwide and in Canada. Moving to Evergreen will save considerable taxpayer dollars, primarily in annual service fees and upgrades.

According to Howe Library Director Mary White, the library has used a proprietary integrated library system since 1995. "While it's one of the best automated systems available, it's also very expensive to maintain and upgrade so we decided to look at alternative options." The result of that comprehensive investigation, headed by Head of Technical Services and Systems Librarian Pamela Smith, was the choice to go with Evergreen.

Evergreen is a library-specific open-source software program developed by the Georgia Public Library Services that allows users to study, change, and improve the software as it is being used. Open-source software is often developed in a public, collaborative manner, and Evergreen is no exception. "Because Evergreen is created collaboratively," says Systems Librarian Smith, "new features and upgrades, such as enhancing the catalog, are free to participating libraries" and maintenance is far less expensive. Library Director White estimates that the cost of maintaining the open-source system will save the library--and the town of Hanover taxpayers--almost 70% in annual maintenance costs compared to Howe Library's old system.

The library chose Equinox Software for data migration as well as for annual maintenance and hosting. Galen Charlton, Vice-President for Data Services at Equinox states, "It has been a true pleasure working with a group of librarians committed to open-source to implement Evergreen, and I am pleased to see the broad interest in open-source integrated library systems across New England. We at Equinox look forward to continuing to work with Howe Library and know that they will be strong members of the Evergreen community."

Howe Library patrons will enjoy some new features with the Evergreen system, such as creating private lists of books they have read or want to read. Patrons will also have more flexibility and control over their bibliographic searches with the new system, including setting account preferences to search their home library only or both Howe and Etna libraries.

Howe is one of only three libraries in New Hampshire using an open-source option, and is the only library in New Hampshire to use Evergreen. "We hope other libraries in New Hampshire will follow our lead," says White. "It would be great to have other libraries create a consortium of users. Pooling resources helps all of us, and ultimately offers our patrons far more than any individual library can on its own."

For more information about Howe Library, please contact Mary White at 603-640-3251 or mary.h.white@thehowe.org.

Yesterday's ice cream social was a rousing success, thanks to the enthusiastic attendance of 65 librarians from 23 libraries. Next time, I'll make sure to get less ice cream and more hot fudge - you are people after my own heart with your epic hot fudge consumption!

Our timeline generated a lot of interest, so I'll post it here:

The production servers are arriving and getting set up between now and the end of September.

We'll be profiling libraries throughout the fall, which we'll do by taking what we have in Horizon and translating it into Evergreenese. We'll be sending out questionnaires to clarify as needed.

Once we've got everyone profiled, we'll start entering rules and settings. We'll keep at that until we're done (it's quite the process).

We'll have the early training (the sneak peek training) from January until March, but the real training will take place in late April.

Go Live is slated for Memorial Day weekend, 2011!

We'll keep all of our members posted on all things Evergreen - keep asking questions!

-Kate (ksheehan@biblio.org)

As a librarian who works at a library that primarily uses the Library of Congress classification scheme, I have been interested for a long time in teaching Evergreen to be aware of call number schemes other than Dewey. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Evergreen simply applies an alphabetical sort against the the uppercased version of the call number when generating call number browser displays - resulting in LC call numbers that sort incorrectly, like:

• K 215 .E53 W37 1997
• K 22 .U748 v.18

When the subject recently came up on the open-ils-general mailing list, I decided to follow up with some code. So, as of this weekend, Evergreen trunk now has a generalized infrastructure for generating sort keys for call numbers. The broad strokes of the current implementation are:

• The classification scheme is set the level of the call number.
• Classification schemes are defined in the asset.call_number_classification table with a pointer to a database function to call to generate a normalized sort key for the given call number.
• Three classification schemes are available out of the box:
  • Generic (the default) - a simple normalization approach that produces reasonable results in the absence of special rules for Cutters, etc
  • Dewey (DDC) - a normalization routine taken from the Koha C4::ClassSortRoutine::Dewey Perl module
  • Library of Congress (LC) - a normalization routine that simply wraps Bill Dueber's excellent Library::CallNumber::LC Perl module
  - and adding more classification schemes is just a matter of adding another row to the asset.call_number_classification table and the appropriate sortkey-generating database function.

Note that this is the first time, to my knowledge, that Koha code has been adopted directly by Evergreen. I included attribution for the copyright holders in both the Generic and Dewey normalization functions. I wrote the Generic implementation in Evergreen from scratch shortly after taking a look at Koha's approach, so in some corners my work would be considered a "derived work". Koha's Dewey normalization function was (somewhat surprisingly) the only open-source implementation that I could find for Dewey, so it made perfect sense to me to adopt that for use in Evergreen. Many thanks to Koha for their use of the GPL v2 or later licence!

There are still some limitations and low-hanging fruit that I hope to address in the near future:

• Right now you can only manipulate classification schemes via SQL. The Holdings Maintenance dialogue needs to give cataloguers the ability to set the classification scheme for each call number, because I'm sure they don't want to drop down to the command line. This setting should probably be sticky during a given session, so that if they're processing a cart of government docs, they won't have to change the scheme from the default to CODOC for each item.
• Speaking of defaults, each library needs to be able to define a default classification scheme - so your consortium can have a Dewey library and an LC library and a SUDOC library, and their preferences won't trample each other. This can just be a simple org-unit setting.
• Following on Mike Rylander's advice, the asset.call_number_classification table should gain a new column that lists the field/subfield combinations used to find the appropriate call number (if any) for each scheme in a given bibliographic record. Then the Holdings Maintenance dialogue can offer the appropriate call number based on the classification scheme.

We created Entity/Relationship (E/R) diagrams of the Evergreen database from the EG Version 1.6 schema.    Reviewing and understanding the data model was very helpful in conjunction with our functional evaluation.   It also helped us prepare for migration training and in planning our data migration.    We plan to update this periodically with corrections and for new versions of Evergreen.

The Windham Free Library is the fifth library in Bibliomation's Development Partner project to go live on Evergreen. The library began circulating items on the BibliOak Evergreen system this morning!

Windham Free joins the Beacon Falls, Hebron, Lebanon, and Sprague libraries on BibliOak.

To view the Windham Free Library catalog, you can go to:

http://acorn.biblio.org/windham

FYI

Here are the minutes from the July 20, 2010 Evergreen Governance Committee meeting.

If you have any questions about these minutes, you can email me at terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.

--Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation, Inc.

Attached is the link to the Evergreen SIP support page.  It helps to have the 3M manual on SIP handy since the definition for all the codes is not included on the Evergreen page.

Here's the 3M SIP2 Manual.

Prompted by a discussion on Twitter (and much needed bit of nagging from @mickfortune as I’ve been thinking about this for a while - thanks Mick!) about the future of Library Management Systems:

I think its pretty much gaining acceptance that the current structure of the ‘traditional’ LMS isn’t quite fitting our current needs or addressing pressures from competing (or potentially complimentary) systems that can bring innovation to some of our day to day processes e.g. RFID and stock management.

A lot of this can be put down to the monolithic nature of existing systems.. if you want to do something with a piece of data it pretty much *has* to be present within the boundaries of the system.. which means we all end up with our own individual silos of replicated information e.g. we all have our own d/b of marc records independent of one another.. we all have our own borrower d/b’s which replicate data found in Student Record systems  etc.. Clearly there’s a lot of inefficient duplication there, and you start to get some interesting challenges in keeping data ‘in sync’ if you want to do something innovative with another system.

So the evolution needed in my opinion is clear.  We ought to be minimising duplication & dealing with data wherever is sits best i.e. plugging into student records for borrower data, doing similar to corporate finance systems as part of the acquisitions process,  linking to a central repository of MARC records rather than each having their own copy etc.. I’d argue that the way to do this is with the LMS morphing into a set of lighweight interfaces behind which sit communication plugins to the data stores we need to access (be that via web services or whatever protocols fit for each case).

Now I know there are significant challenges in there, some technical (and there are many people far better qualified to detail those than me), some security / privacy related, some structural & management related.. but I don’t see anything thats I’d class as an absolute ’show stopper’ preventing it happening.

..but barring Ex Libris’ URM project, and several of the areas Talis are working in, I don’t see signs of this shift even beginning to happen in the proprietary LMS sector.  You could probably come up with a dozen reasons for this - surely to include costs, resourcing to ’start from scratch again’ in this manner, inertia of existing marketplace etc..

Few of those reasons are valid or apply in the same way if you shift the focus to Open Source systems - the business model is just different.  Hence we already see Kuali OLE shaping up in this manner, and I suspect you could start to look at a long term development plan for Evergreen (and possibly other OSS LMS systems) that moved in that direction also.

This is why long term I think OSS represents a valuable way forward for Libraries - the flexibility & agility of the OSS approach means we can be more innovative more quickly in moving development forward.. I’d also like to hope that the competition will in turn move the proprietary companies to be a bit more agile in their offering too - I am not anti-proprietary at all, and believe that there’s a place for both approaches in the library world, indeed a blended approach of OSS & proprietary systems is something I see working very well in some libraries..

I’d just finish by saying I don’t claim any of the ideas mentioned above are ‘my own’ - they’re all  things that have been knocking around for a while.. this is just my personal take on it all.

Apologies for a longer & more rambling post than intended!

The Evergreen Communication Committee will meet  (conference call) this month at Noon EST today.  If you would like to participate, contact Lori Bowen Ayre.

read more

This is an updated copy of the presentation that Matt Carlson and Bill Erickson did at lunchtime at the Evergreen Conference in Grand Rapids in April.

 

Here are the minutes from the June 30, 2010 Evergreen Governance Committee meeting.

If you have any questions about these minutes, you can email me at terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.

 

 

We all scream for Evergreen! Oh, and ice cream...

Bibliomation members are invited to an ice cream social at Middlebury Public Library. We'll hear from BibliOak members about their experiences with Evergreen and the open source team will demo some exciting Evergreen features.

When: August 10 10:00 a.m.
Where: Middlebury Public Library

We'll start with the Q+A with the development partners, then we'll have ice cream during the demo!

You supply your questions, we'll supply the hot fudge!

RSVP to Joan at jshamato@biblio.org

CC image from D Sharon Pruitt

King County Library System shared a preview yesterday of the public catalog interface the system will be using when it goes live on Evergreen in the fall (click on the PDF link at the bottom of the message to see the screenshots).

read more

More background, as I think it’s useful to document a little bit about Conifer here.

The original plan of Conifer was  ” to create a consortial implementation of the Evergreen open source library system by five project partners:

• Algoma University
• Laurentian University
• McMaster University
• Northern Ontario School of Medicine
• University of Windsor “
  

Its interesting to note at this point that the agreement was very much on a ‘handshake’ basiswithout a formal partnership agreement or SLA.  While I understand why this was the case, this is an area where I do feel the UK could & would do things differently, if for no better reason than to protect participating institutions & to provide a resilience strategy should any partner withdraw or have difficulties.

Some of the reasoning behind the birth of Conifer can be found in a white paper prepared by the group in October 2007 (and work building up to that - much of which is chronicled in Dan’s blog).  Reading that back now it seems either incredibly prescient, or you could take the more depressing view that we’ve known about the issues we face for quite some time but the UK in particular has been very slow to respond to them.

With an ambitious goal of going live by May 2009, the project progressed steadily, drawing up requirements for missing functionality like Academic Reserves, Serials and Acquisitions, and initialising development work.

A slight hiccup appeared at the start of 2009 when McMaster, one of the founding partners, decided to withdraw from the consortium.  They agreed to continue contributing to Evergreen development, but would migrate to Evergreen “on their own time frame and on their own locally hosted servers”

The rest of the project partners adjusted plans, picked up the areas of slack, and the consortium did indeed go live on Monday 4th May 2009

..our visit to Laurentian came then pretty much at 1 year in with Evergreen for them & the rest of the consortium - an ideal time to chart what’d worked, what (if anything) hadn’t, lessons to be learned for others following in their footsteps, and, where they plan to go from here…

On to possibly the key item on our agenda - a day spent with Dan Scott & colleagues at Laurentian University, talking about & seeing Evergeen in use across a HE led consortium of services.

We were picked up from our hotel at around 8.30am by Kevin Beswick, a developer at Laurentian, and another one to add to the list of the many, really nice people we met on our trip, and we headed off on a short drive to the University.

Initial impressions were that the Campus is very nice, clean & spacious. Laurentian has about 9000 (c8400FTE) students, though there were few of them to be seen on our arrival as we’d turned up during Vacation time.  Having seen the sturdy concrete set litter bins complete with steel shuttered tops  dotted around Campus I did wonder if there were particular ‘issues’ with student behaviour, only to be told no, the bins were designed to stop them being raided by bears from the surrounding courtyside & woods.  I’m not entirely sure whether this was re-assuring or not!

On to the Library, where Dan met us & took us a quick tour round (the Brenda Wallace reading room in particular was very eye-catching, and must be a great place to study), where we met a number of Laurentian Library staff, before going on to a meeting with Leila Wallenius (the University Librarian) & Dan to give us some context.

Some facts & figures for you about Laurentian University Library:

Student Numbers - 9000 full & part time (c8400FTE)

Annual Print Spend - approx Can$300,000

Annual spend on e-resources - approc Can$1.8 million (e-resources are really well managed and a key part of the library ‘offer’ in Canada..E-books in particular are bought in high quantitites &  seem to be subject to far higher takeup than I have seen in the UK)

Stock - c400,000 itmes (see Comment from Dan Scott for exact figures)

Annual loans & renewals - c70,000 (this initially seemed low to us, as we’re used to a far higher volume of transactions, but difference may be accounted for by various factors identified in comments on this post.  If you add in e-accesses the figure would probably triple.. another pointer to a quite different balance of resource use compared to the UK.  )  Edited to add - talking of circ figures, for proof on Evergreen’s ability to scale it’s worth pointing out the links kindly provided by Dan in the comments section, namely http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=355 and http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=314 ..I don’t think I know of a UK consortium even that would hit those sort of numbers

‘Professional’ Library Staff - 6 (and we were fascinated  to learn that professional library posts are treated as Faculty positions in Canada, complete with conditions such as being able to go on paid Sabbatical every 7th year to undertake research related activities - see Comments section for further thoughts on this).  Librarians have roles far broader than anywhere I have seen in the UK, and are supported by a range of para-professional & clerical level staff.

Library Systems in use - Evergreen (as part of Conifer group), SFX

Overall,  lots of subtle differences from a similar setup in the UK, but still very much comparable

Early start, and a cab ride through Washington’s rush hour to get to the airport on time.

We then flew to Toronto, where we caught a flight out to Sudbury, Ontario for the next stage of our journey - a visit to Laurentian University.  This stage of the trip would also be a quite a trip back down memory lane for my colleague Paul, who’d spent a four years living in Sudbury as a youngster as his parents had taught at Laurentian.

Encountered first major hiccup of the trip when Air Canada ‘lost’ my luggage on the Washington to Toronto step of the trip, leaving me without so much as a change of clothes or toothbrush for when we arrived in Sudbury.

We were met at the airport by Dan Scott, Systems Librarian (amongst several other roles) at Laurentian, Evergreen developer, blogger, and all round really nice guy.  Dan took us on a quick tour of Sudbury (including ‘The Big Nickel’) en route to our Hotel, as well as stopping off for me to obtain some emergency clothing & toiletries, and we chatted during the journey about some of the background to his work at Laurentian, Evergreen, and Project Conifer  - more on this in the next few posts.

Hotel we stayed on this occasion was fabulous - amazingly friendly & helpful staff, good rooms, free fast WiFi, and very good food.  Once we settled into our rooms & eaten some dinner (by time of arrival at the Hotel it was way past 6.30pm) both Paul & retired to our rooms to prepare for the visit to Laurentian

After an eventful night spent barricading the entrances to my hotel room (after a very strange encounter with an attempted visitor trying to sell me a variety of illegal substances) we felt we’d gathered enough at yesterday’s marathon ALA 2010 session to justify a rest & attempt to get over the jet lag.  Hence we went off & did the usual ‘tourist’ stuff of museums, monuments & the White House.

Washington is a truly amazing city (though we were wilting a bit in the 99F heat & matching humidity).  Highlights for me in particular were the Lincoln Memorial & associated views out across the park, and the Museum of Air & Space - truly a couple of hours in geek heaven.

Talking of the Air & Space museum, I couldn’t help but revert to work mode & admire the fabulous use of space & the presentation of what they had to offer - clearly a lot of attention had been paid to the detail of the ‘flow’ of visitors through the Museum  and how to manage that while getting the best experience in terms of being able to see the exhibits.. despite the huge amount of people there I really never felt uncomfortable,  crowded or rushed.  You can learn things that might be useful to libraries in the most surprising of places if you approach everything with an open mind & open eyes

Everyone has an emergency now and then. Trying to keep your head above water whilst paying bills can be extremely difficult. There just always seem to be those unaccounted expenses that suddenly catch you off guard. What can you do when faced with such a situation? You could apply for that bank loan. However, it's nowhere near fast enough. What about extending the limits on credit cards and taking a cash advance? You could do that. However, once you realize the interest rate charged on cash advances can be as high as 22%, it no longer seems like a feasible option.

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As part of the informal partnership between the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and Project Conifer, I was pleased to be able to spend the last two weeks in Amsterdam, working side-by-side with one of the Institute's developers, Ole Kerpel, on augmenting the support for MARC21 authorities in Evergreen. To prepare for the work session, I had posted a blueprint for the authorities work on the Evergreen Launchpad instance and circulated the list of requirements we had been asked to address to the broader Evergreen development community. We were fortunate to have the attention of Mike Rylander on the proposal, who not only supplied suggestions for how to implement some of the items, but also committed significant code contributions to the effort that greatly assisted our efforts. Here is a summary of the goals we accomplished in the current development branch of Evergreen (targeted for the 2.0 release), followed by a list of the outstanding items and my finger-in-the-air estimate of how much more time it would take to accomplish each of the tasks:

Accomplishments

• Controllable control numbers

  While not, strictly speaking, a requirement for authority control in and of itself, the ability to ensure that the behaviour of the 001/003/035 fields all conformed to the MARC21 specifications was an important requirement for IISH. They plan to provide external access to their authority and bibliographic records, so making the official identifier fields linkable based on the underlying record ID was an important aspect of the work. We implemented this feature as an optional database-level trigger to ensure that the control numbers and control number identifiers are always perfectly in sync with the internal identifier of the particular system on which the records are stored.

• Links

  Where having Mike Rylander participate in your review process pays off, part one... Before I even arrived in Amsterdam, Mike implemented a tricky database trigger that tracks the links between a given bibliographic record and the authority records to which it links. The links are tracked at the database level, as well as directly in one or more 0 subfields in each field that is controlled by an authority record. Yes, a given field in a bibliographic record can be controlled by two authority records and it all works. Nice, Mike!

• Syncs

  Where having Mike Rylander participate in your review process pays off, part two... Mike also implemented the bulk of the logic for automatically updating bibliographic records that are linked to a given authority record when that authority record is modified. Yes, folks, when you add a death date to an authority record, it will automatically appear in the corresponding bib records.

• Control an uncontrolled set of bibliographic records

  You may have dealt with library systems in the past that use some sort of string matching to implement authority support. As noted above, Evergreen is not like that. However, this means that many of us, when migrating to Evergreen, have bibliographic records lacking the 0 subfields that are required for full authority support. Towards that end, I wrote a script that will walk through a set of bibliographic records, search for matching authority records for each controllable field in each bibliographic record, and add the required 0 subfields to the bibliographic records. It certainly won't be a fast solution, but you should only need to do it once, and it worked on the limited test cases that we had ready at hand.

• Teach the MARC editor about authority records

  The MARC editor knew all about fixed fields for bibliographic records, and provided a handy grid for editing those fields. However, it didn't even know how to recognize authority records, and presented a fixed field grid that was absolutely meaningless. I spent a chunk of time laboriously transcribing the fixed field rules from MARC documentation into the MARC editor and now the MARC editor presents a reasonable fixed field grid for your editing convenience.

• Merge authority records

  Something that often happens in a library is that two authority records are created that identify the same thing. Eventually somebody notices the problem and wants to merge the authority records together. Towards this end, I added a database-level stored procedure that supports the merging of authority records, such that the linked bibliographic records will automatically point to the winning authority record.

• Authority browse interfaces

  Where having Mike Rylander participate in your review process pays off, part the third... Mike also implemented basic browse interfaces that presents a series of authority records in MARCXML format matching your requested authority type (author, title, subject, topic) and the matching substring at the /opac/extras/browse and /opac/extras/startwith URL entry points. While still raw at this point, these can provide the basis for classic authority browse interfaces for those who desperately desire them.

Remaining to-do items

Note that any estimates are based on how long I think it would take me to implement, based on my own familiarity with MARC and Evergreen and all things Perl and JavaScript and PostgreSQL, and provided with the granularity of no less than one day. Actual implementation times may vary, of course; if related work items are worked on consecutively, then it is likely to take less time to achieve than if the items are tackled sporadically.

• Add an authority in the flow

  When you're working in the MARC Editor and you find that there is no match for an entry that you really think should be controlled, IISH wants to make it easy for a cataloguer to add an authority record for that entry. We thought that there might be two options that we would want to expose - a direct "create an authority record from this field" option that takes no further input, and a "create an authority record from this field and open it in another MARC editor to let me tweak it" option. Estimate: 2 person days

• Highlight controlled fields

  This is really a two-part problem. First, for uncontrolled fields, we want to teach the Validate button to offer the kind of automatic matching that the script does and add the required 0 subfield. Second, we want to highlight fields that are explicitly controlled by authority records with a subfield differently from fields that simply match an authority record, but which are not controlled by it. Estimate: 1 person day

• Simplify authority record selection

  This two-part requirement would mask many of the fields that are currently offered as options when you right-click on an uncontrolled subfield to display matching authority records. For example, it is a little weird to offer a "See from" heading to a cataloguer; we're trying to avoid adding new records with those headings, right? Heh. Second, we want to introduce the ability to invoke the authority browse list in this interface so that the cataloguer can see a given set of headings in context and select the heading to apply from there. Estimate: 2 person days

• Delete authority record

  There is currently no cataloguer-friendly way to delete authority records. We need to expose a list of authority records (probably reusing that browse list again) and make it possible for cataloguers to delete an authority record. When that record is deleted, all bibliographic records that link to it need to have their links removed - and ideally, the cataloguer would be able to tell how many bibliographic records link to that authority before the delete takes place. Estimate: 1 person day

• Edit and merge authority records

  Although the database-level support now exists for merging authority records, we need to expose a means for cataloguers to select the authority records that they want to edit or merge. This could just be a slightly evolved version of the "Delete" interface. Estimate: 1 person day

• Expose authority records via SRU/Z39.50/crawlable interface

  One of the goals of the IISH is to be able to share their authority records with other institutions. One of the standard methods is SRU + Z39.50 server support; we should be able to build on the SRU/Z39.50 server support for bibliographic records in Evergreen to provide a basic solution for authority records. Interest has also been expressed in having a crawlable implementation that would give the linked data crowd something to play with. Estimate: 2 person days for an SRU/Z39.50 server, 1 person day for a very basic crawlable linked-data implementation

In summary - hurray for Mike Rylander for helping us out to such an extent, and many thanks, again, to IISH for giving me an opportunity to focus on Evergreen development for an extended period of time, and to Laurentian University for supporting my efforts. I hope that between Ole and myself that it will be possible to finish the rest of these work items prior to the Evergreen 2.0 release. It has been exhilarating to see far Evergreen's authority support has come in less than a month, and given a little more time I suspect that Evergreen's authority support will be the envy of other library systems.

In an attempt to force myself to post more often, I’m starting a new series tentatively called “A peek behind the curtain at.” I’m not sure how often these will happen or exactly where it will lead, but if you want more (or less) of this, just comment below. ?And now, on to the main event!

We’re often asked how indexing of bibliographic material works in Evergreen. That’s a hard question to answer because, firstly, indexing is a hard problem to solve in practice. It’s also a hard question to answer because our solution is, well, mutable.

In Evergreen you can control what data is indexed, how it is presented to the indexer, how it is normalized for indexing — both as a raw value and as an index vector that is used internally — and the weights and ranking bonuses that any field can have when contributing to a result set.

All of that means indexing and searching are complex problems with complex solutions. So, as a start to explaining the process, I have created two pieces of documentation that I hope will help others understand what is going on under the covers, and perhaps spur discussion of how to improve and extend the Evergreen indexing and search infrastructure in the future.

To see how data is indexed, head over here on the Evergreen wiki. This covers the state of the art in trunk, what will become Evergreen 2.0 in the future.

Likewise, a discussion of searching is available here on the wiki. This is also targeted at trunk/2.0.

Please comment here, or start a thread on the open-ils-dev mailing list, if you’d like to take this discussion further. I look forward to any feedback!

In the next installment of the “behind the curtain” series I plan to highlight documentation describing what you can do with a search result for display purposes.

–miker

UPDATE: For some reason, WordPress decided that every sentence by the first in each paragraph should start with a question mark.  I’ve disabused it of that notion.  Also, it’s “peek”, not “peak” …

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA - July 13, 2010

The New Mexico State Library is contracting with Equinox Software, Inc to host two Koha databases, one for the State Library's Books By Mail program and one for their Rural Bookmobiles service. Equinox is also providing data migration services and support.

According to Gary Harris, the Director of the Technical Services Bureau at the State Library, "The New Mexico State Library began an evaluation of the Koha Integrated Library Management System in 2008. We were impressed with the software from the beginning, but we encountered a few problems with implementation. We have a test system up and running, but decided to get help from an open source software support company. We began a selection process in January 2010, and Equinox came out on top for several reasons, not to mention their solid reputation and contributions to the Koha community."

Brad LaJeunesse, Equinox CEO, says, "Equinox's expansion into Koha migration and support was the next logical step for us to take. We are particularly excited to be working with the New Mexico State Library as they have shown such enthusiasm and support for the Open Source community."</p?>

Galen Charlton, VP for Data Services at Equinox, adds, "I am personally very pleased to be continuing my work with Koha and Koha libraries, and I welcome the New Mexico State Library to the community of libraries who are using Koha to enhance services to their patrons".

About New Mexico State Library

The New Mexico State Library, established in 1929, is committed to providing leadership that promotes effective library services and access to information to all citizens of New Mexico. The State Library provides services that support public libraries as well as delivers direct library services to rural populations, state agencies, the visually impaired and physically disabled, and students and citizens conducting research.

About Koha

Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual database design (text based and RDBMS) built to be library standards compliant. Koha's OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are free to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development service.

For more information on Koha, please visit http://koha-community.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 770-709-5571

After the shock at the size of the exhibition hall wore off (I estimate you could fit the usual LIS Show at the NEC into less than a quarter of the floor area), we went for a wander round the themed ‘technology’ area.

One of the first things that struck us both was how mainstream the OSS presence was - the stands for companies like Equinox, Liblime & others were equal in size (quite often bigger!), and spaced just as prominently as those for the more traditional proprietary companies such as Ex Libris, SirsiDynix, Innovative etc..

..and the interest being shown by people in the products was very encouraging indeed  - lots of traffic, lots of conversations going on wherever you stopped.

The Equinox stand had a great setup with iMacs running the latest development build of Evergreen, complete with the Acquisitions functionality that so many people have been waiting for.  We had some time looking at this, and while not yet complete, it was encouraging to see Fund structures, some EDI setup, and things like currency conversion tools in place.

We stopped for a chat with Brad LeJeunesse, who was really behind the whole Evergreen project at the start, and discussed his time at Georgia Pines, and the drivers behind making such a radical jump.  It seems that lack of scalability & reliability in their previous proprietary LMS was what drove Pines down the route of commissioning their own OSS LMS, and while this was clearly a high risk strategy, there really didn’t seem to have been an alternative other than dissolving the consortium into smaller sections.

We also renewed our acquaintance with the excellent Bob Molyneaux of Equinox (who was busy handing out copies of the Evergreen LMS on CD to anyone who wanted one - a complete LMS to take home with you, that’s the kind of freebie you don’t get anywhere else!), who told us a little about the King County Library System (KCLS) decision to migrate to Evergreen (a copy of their RFP can be found at http://oss4pl.org/ along with lots of other interesting documentation), and also introduced us  to Amy Terlaga of Bibliomation (a Connecticut Evergreen consortium) and Lori Bowen Ayre of the Galecia Group.  A very interesting chat about reasons for migration, and business & support models ensued.

After a long time chatting with a variety of people at the Equinox stand we headed off for a further look around the exhibition, stopping to take in a quick demo of OCLC’s new web based LMS - which only had circulation module present so far, but looked quite nice, a wide variety of LMS & RFID vendors (RFID is another area we’re doing quite a lot of work in), and numerous suppliers of electronic resources (such as Credo Reference, who were showing off some nice new feartures to their product) we stopped for a quick chat with Tim at LibraryThing before heading off to the Evergreen meetup at the Buddha Bar at 4.30pm - a short walk away from the Conference Centre

At the meetup we sat down with Jed Moffitt, who is heading up the KCLS Evergreen project.  Again, this seems born out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the service they were recieving from their proprietary supplier, but what was really interesting is the scale of the plans, and the potential impact on Evergreen as a whole.

KCLS have received grant funding of $1.2 million for their project, which they are match funding, meaning the total amount being invested into the migration & associated Evergreen developments over quite a short term period is $2.4 million.  This has been spread around not just Equinox, but numerous other development houses, and will drive progress in a number of areas.  Acquisitions & Serials will be completed, the Circulation interface & OPAC will have a makeover, and a variety of other enhancements are all planned… KCLS are due to go live in October 2010, so that seems to be a date to watch.  It was also interesting to see the number of other libraries watching the KCLS migration before making key desicions themselves about Evergreen - one gets the feeling that it could be a real ‘game changer’ of a moment.  So no pressure there then Jed!

We had several discussions with other Evergreen users over the course of the next two and a half hours, with all being completely open & very positive about their experiences.  The whole OSS ethos of regaining control over their LMS development, and the freedom that the OSS business model represents  was perhaps the key theme of nearly every conversation.

As the group split up at around 7pm, Paul & I grabbed a well earned & very late dinner, followed by a quick beer & then headed off back to the Hotel.  We felt we’d got a lot of material from the day - almost too much to digest quickly really, but the air of confidence in Evergreen and the friendliness of the Community had really struck home with us both

Refreshed after at least a partial night’s sleep (jet lag kicking in early as neither of us had quite adjusted to the fact we were on -5 hours from UK time), and fortified by a breakfast of pastries, waffles & bagels, we headed for the Convention Centre at a little after 8am

A short Metro journey later, and we were following bunches of people who were obviously librarians (there’s something distinctive about a librarian - you can just spot us as a profession can’t you?) towards the Convention Centre.  On getting there I think the sheer scale of things took me somewhat aback… it isn’t like any conference I’ve ever attended in the UK in terms of the scale of the exhibition, or the sheer amount of people milling round.  We were told that an estimated 20,000 people would be attending the conference over the 4 days it was running.

Travelling across to Bristol Airport on the Thursday just involved a fairly quick train & bus journey.  We stayed at a very nice if a little soul-less hotel a couple of miles form the airport, and once we’d settled in & had some food both Paul & I retired back to our rooms and I spent the rest of the evening running through my copy of the United Kingdom Core Specification (UKCS), and the associated wiki online, making some notes on areas I wanted to cover on our trip.  I was also quite unsure of what to expect in the USA & Canada as this would be my first trip to either country

The flight out on Friday 25th was pretty uneventful - 7 hours + on a ‘Continental’ Flight.  It was enlivened slightly by the fact the plane was late arriving in Newark, so we had quite a rush getting to our connecting flight in time.. Oh, and USA Immigration & Customs, well.. not exactly a welcoming experience!

Nevertheless, we made it out into the 90F heat & humidity of DC roughly on time, and used the excellent (& very cheap!) ‘Metro’ transit system to find our way to the hotel.  Unfortunately in keeping to budget & booking as cheap a place a possible, it wasn’t the best.. A couple of miles out of the centre (though only about half a mile from a Metro station), with pretty limited facilities, and in a quite run-down area.  Still, cheap motels are all part of the USA experience, and at least it had a swimming pool (bizarrely situated open air in the middle of the car park)

In detail it looked like this:

Thursday 24th June - afternoon travel to Bristol airport for early morning flight to USA.  Stay in small hotel near airport

Friday 25th June - Catch 10.30am flight Bristol to Reagan National Airport in Washington DC, changing flights at Newark

Saturday 26th June - Spend day at ALA 2010 Conference at Washington Exhibition Centre (Exhibition only tickets), then attend informal Evergreen meetup 4.30m - 6.30pm

Sunday 27th June - Take a break, get over the jetlag.  Possibly go back to ALA 2010 Exhibition if we needed more material

Monday 28th June - Fly from Washington DC to Sudbury Ontario, flight going via Toronto, and getting to Sudbury c4.30pm

Tuesday 29th June - Spend day at Laurentian University with Dan Scott & others

Wednesday 30th June - Fly back to UK.  Quite complicated travel plan as going Sudbury > Toronto > Newark > Bristol UK, would eventually mean landing at Bristol c8.45am on Thursday 1st July, and then getting the train home from there

To be honest, even on paper, it seemed a pretty punishing schedule, but worthwhile for what we’d learn….

One of the key challenges on exploring the Evergreen Library Management System for a UK based library is quite simply whom to talk to.

As yet no UK library has, to our knowledge, gone down the route of implementing this system, though there have been several installations of the other main OSS product ‘Koha’.  So, in order to gain some insight into experiences with Evergreen we knew we’d hav to travel further afield…

We decided to combine two strands to the trip, and try to get the maximum value from the grant we obtained from JISC, so the following plan & itinerary was hatched:

1) Fly to Washington DC and attend the exhibition at ALA 2010 conference.  This would enable us to speak to Equinox software (setup by the originator of the Evergreen project, Brad Lejeunesse, and possibly the most well known of the US based support companies for the product), and also talk to other libraries who had either implemented Evergreen or were thinking of doing so at a planned meetup on the Saturday afternoon

2) Go on to Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, where we would spend a day with Dan Scott.  Laurentian University had been one of the first university libraries to go down the Evergreen route, along with their colleagues in the ‘Conifer’ project, and Dan is extremely well known and active amongst the Evergreen Community.

So, with some careful planning on dates, and much searching of the web for discounted flights & cheap hotels, we finally managed to book the trip for myself & Paul Johnson within the budget we’d identified, and we set off on our trip on 24th June

Outline Project Description

Project to produce a case study & supporting materials detailing & evaluating functionality of the Open Source product ‘Evergreen’ against UK Academic library requirements utilising the United Kingdom Core Specification documents. This will address a significant existing gap in the UK information available on the system at a time when consideration of Open Source Library Systems is increasing rapidly.

1.    The elements of the project aim are to:

·         Investigate current functionality level offered in the open source system ‘Evergreen’ in relation to UK market requirements using the UK Core specification as a guideline.

·         Compile a ‘functionality gap’ report based on that investigation

·         Identify any further ‘functionality gaps’ arising from experiences of existing ‘Evergreen’ implementations in Higher Education

·         Produce report identifying timeline & potential resource / funding costs for Evergreen to match basic & advanced UK market requirements for implementation.

·         Produce case study on identified problem areas / viable timeline for UK libraries to consider Evergreen as implementable to a satisfactory UK standard

Outline Project Plan

1.    The project will be split into 3 main phases, data gathering, comparison of functionality vs the UK Core Specification (latest version), and case study compilation.  Each phase is represented as a work package

·         Workpackage one : Data Gathering

o   Investigation undertaken, to include review of all available online documentation, attendance at the ALA 2010 Conference for meetings with both Equinox Software (http://www.esilibrary.com/esi/) the primary Evergreen Developer, and attendance at an Evergreen  users meeting , followed by reference site visit to the current top Academic implementation at the Laurentian University, Canada, which will also include discussions with another major Evergreen Developer, Dan Scott.

o   Deliverables: Written reports on current state of development of Evergreen / current roadmap.  Blog posts / tweets / photos / video of Evergreen ‘in action’ at a live site to help build confidence in it use as a product/

o   Timeline: 6 weeks

·         Workpackage 2 : Comparison vs UK Core Specification

o   Completion of UK Core specification in relation to Evergreen functionality / published roadmap.

o   Deliverables: Completed UK Core Specification document, ‘functionality gap’ report.

o   Timeline: 8 weeks

·         Workpackage 3: Case Study Compilation.

o   Deliverables : Case study including report & background material generated by packages 1 & 2.

o   Timeline: 8 weeks

Budget Outline

JISC Funding £5,000 (37% total project cost inc. Institutional costs)

Costs Split across following areas & %’s

Staff Costs = 38% total

Travel Costs = 22%

Dissemination Costs = 3%

Other Costs = 3%

Institutional indirect costs =  34%

Bibliomation is partnering with four other Evergreen sites to sponsor some enhancements that will benefit academic libraries and K-12 schools.

The enhancements will allow Evergreen libraries to apply hard due dates and end-of-semester dates against specific patron profile groups.

The four partners working with Bibliomation are:

Sage Library System (Eastern Oregon)
Kirtland Community College (Michigan)
MassLNC (Massachusetts)
Project Conifer (Ontario, Canada)

The enhancements will be developed by Equinox, Inc. A cost and time estimate should be provided to Bibliomation and its partners in the coming week.

For more information, you can contact me at terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.

Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation, Inc.

In an effort to ensure that RSCEL activities build on community efforts rather than dissipate those efforts, we've joined forces with the official Evergreen project page (evergreen-ils.org).  RSCEL is now a subdomain of the official Evergreen pages.

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As an Evergreen developer, I believe our project has a few significant gaps that projects like RSCEL might be able to help address for the overall good of the community by bringing in outside resources to the project. Or perhaps there are skills within the community that don't feel like they've been called on yet; when I say that we lack skills, I'm basing that on the lack of patches and offers of assistance that I've seen in these areas. I would be delighted to be proven wrong! Either way, I submit this for the community's consideration.

• 3rd party security audit: Before Conifer adopted Evergreen, I had hoped that we would be able to fund a security audit of the code by a trusted and competent 3rd party like OmniTI (from a previous life, I believe that OmniTI employs some of the best people in the business, thus the plug - but there are certainly other options out there). As developers, we try our best to avoid vulnerabilities, but as the recently disclosed vulnerability in open-ils.pcrud attests, we're not experts in security. An audit of the public-facing interfaces (the catalogue, feeds, etc) would be a great help to the project. I would expect a prioritized list of areas that need to be addressed, along with recommendations on how to address those problems (whether they be cross-site scripting, session fixation attacks, authentication encryption attacks, etc). Our community's process (or lack thereof) for reporting and addressing security vulnerabilities might be an appropriate subject for an audit as well.
• Testing framework: Our project is woefully short on tests, either human-powered or automated, for determining the state of the code at any given point in a release cycle. Thus, we have put out release after release that either won't install cleanly, or won't upgrade successfully from a previous release. The trunk version of the code had a error that meant that Evergreen couldn't be compiled; that problem existed for three weeks before somebody noticed and fixed it. I'm not pointing fingers, here; if I did that, I wouldn't have enough fingers to point back at myself for all of the problems I've introduced that other people have had to fix. Johnathan Nightingale in The Most Important Thing … or How Mozilla Does Security and What You Can Steal provides a great overview of Mozilla's philosophy about and approach to testing. There is all kinds of goodness in this presentation, but one of the most interesting points is that "money can be exchanged for services" -- that is to say, if your existing development team doesn't have the skills or time to implement a testing infrastructure, there are companies that do have the ability to put together a test infrastructure for a given project. Once that infrastructure is in place, it tends to get extended and used by the existing development team because it makes their lives easier; they don't need to manually test a given code path every time in the future, or deal with regressions that aren't noticed until months in the future when the changes they were making are no longer fresh in their minds. It sometimes requires a culture change, though.
• Continuous integration: Hand in hand with a testing framework is a continuous integration server that provides testing feedback on every commit to the Evergreen repository for a given set of branches. Even without a testing framework, it is possible to have a continuous integration server run through the process of installing all prerequisites, configuring the code, building and installing the code, and creating the database schema to at least determine whether the basics can be accomplished successfully to confirm that a branch is ready for release. This arguably also goes hand in hand with a team's process for addressing a security vulnerability: if you have a continuous integration server that can tell you if a given fix does not introduce basic build and install errors, then you can get a new release out with much more confidence that you're not going to be encouraging your users to jump to a broken package. Note that Equinox ran a continuous integration server for OpenSRF and Evergreen trunk for a while, but that was killed and replaced by a call for volunteers to build a new continuous integration service (I can't find a more to-the-point call for volunteers, so perhaps it just hasn't been advertised widely enough - or again, perhaps we lack the skills in the community to get a standard CI service like Hudson running.)
• Packaging: To decrease the difficulty of installing and configuring Evergreen, we need more investment in packaging Evergreen and all of its unpackaged dependencies. The idea is that a user should be able to run "aptitude install evergreen" or "yum install evergreen" and have the entire system installed and configured, and then run "aptitude upgrade" or "yum upgrade" to have newer versions installed. Right now the process is still rather onerous and requires a great deal of manual effort, although it has improved significantly since the early days of 2007. Again, this requires a particular set of skills that the Evergreen community does not appear to possess in depth: autoconf, automake, APT and RPM packaging - and perhaps some redesign of elements like skins to make local customizations easier to incorporate and keep up to date. This would be a natural complement to a continuous integration service, but much of the effort could also be done on its own.

Occasionally I drop down to the database level to generate some reporting information. You could probably get the same information through the reporter but I like the precision of SQL. Here are a couple of queries that I've put together recently.

List titles for periodicals published by "Human Kinetics" with subscriptions owned by library ID "OSUL"

SELECT rsr.id, rsr.title 
  FROM metabib.full_rec mfr
    INNER JOIN metabib.rec_descriptor mrd ON mfr.record = mrd.record
    INNER JOIN asset.call_number acn ON acn.record = mrd.record
    INNER JOIN reporter.super_simple_record rsr ON rsr.id = mrd.record
    INNER JOIN actor.org_unit aou ON aou.id = acn.owning_lib
  WHERE mfr.tag = '260' 
    AND mfr.subfield = 'b'
    AND mfr.value ilike 'Human Kinetics%'
    AND mrd.bib_level = 's'
    AND aou.shortname = 'OSUL'
;

Strip out URLs for an online resource to which we no longer subscribe

Occasionally we drop subscriptions to an online resource that we happened to catalogue with an inline 856 field. Our new approach relies on just-in-time results from our link resolver to display accurate access to online resources (or at least consistent representations of what we have access to!), but our legacy records placed all of that information directly in the 856 field in the corresponding bibliographic record. The PostgreSQL regexp_replace() function lets you use regular expressions to match subsets of the MARC record and replace it with... well... nothing, in this case.

As we want to subsequently reingest the MARC records, and we're not running Evergreen trunk yet in which a reingest will automatically be triggered by an update to the biblio.record_entry table, I first push the list of affected IDs into a scratch table. This also lets me put limits on the MARC records that I'm going to touch, so that I don't inadvertently destroy content in another library's set of bibliographic records.

CREATE TABLE scratchpad.urls_to_delete (id BIGINT);
INSERT INTO scratchpad.urls_to_delete 
  SELECT acn.record
    FROM asset.uri au
      INNER JOIN asset.uri_call_number_map aucnm ON au.id = aucnm.uri
      INNER JOIN asset.call_number acn ON aucnm.call_number = acn.id
      INNER JOIN actor.org_unit aou ON acn.owning_lib = aou.id
    WHERE au.href ILIKE '%/search.ebscohost.com/direct.asp?db=rch%' 
     AND aou.shortname = 'OSUL'
;

BEGIN; 

UPDATE biblio.record_entry
  SET marc = regexp_replace(
    marc,
    E'<datafield tag="856" ind1="4" ind2="0"><subfield code="z">Available online from Ebsco.*?search.ebscohost.com/direct.asp\\?db=rch.*?</datafield>',
    ''
  )
  WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM scratchpad.urls_to_delete);

Note that the UPDATE statement is preceded by a BEGIN statement so that we can check our results and issue a ROLLBACK if we inadvertently changed too much, or created mangled records. Once you check your work with a SELECT statement or two, you can issue a COMMIT statement to make the changes take effect.

On Thursday, June 17th, we realized that the open-ils.pcrud service, which provides permission-protected access to Evergreen data in the 1.6 release series, was subject to a security vulnerability. The vulnerability allows a user to access objects outside of the permissions they have been granted by supplying fleshing arguments to the open-ils.pcrud search service.

By Thursday evening, a patch for the vulnerability had been committed to Evergreen trunk, and by Friday evening that patch had been backported to the 1.6.0 branch. The Evergreen 1.6.0.6 security release was uploaded on Tuesday June 22, and it took until late Friday June 26 to write up the upgrade instructions, release notes, and update the downloads page for the http://evergreen-ils.org Web site.

Today, we worked out how to apply just the security fix to a running system, so that Evergreen libraries can close the vulnerability without having to apply the full release upgrade. The procedure is as follows:

1. Download the fixed file: http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/export/16749/branches/rel_1_6_0/Open-ILS/src/c-apps/oils_cstore.c
2. Copy oils_cstore.c over Open-ILS/src/c-apps/oils_cstore.c in the source directory you used to install your Evergreen system
3. Run ‘make’ to compile the updated libraries
4. Install the chrpath tool (“aptitude install chrpath”)
5. Run “chrpath -d Open-ILS/src/c-apps/.libs/oils_pcrud.so” to enable the library to link to the appropriate location
6. Copy Open-ILS/src/c-apps/.libs/oils_pcrud.so.* to /openils/lib/.
7. Restart the Evergreen C services by running ‘osrf_ctl.sh -a restart_c’

If you are running Evergreen 1.6, we recommend that you apply this security fix as soon as possible, then upgrade to the latest release (1.6.0.6) when you have an opportunity. Evergreen sites running releases prior to 1.6 are not affected by this vulnerability.

This is the HTML version of the glossary published in PDF format last week. It was converted to HTML by request. See version note at the bottom for version details.

An Open Source ILS Glossary

The Cathedral & the Bazaar	A book written by Eric S. Raymond (O’Reilly, 2001). A must read if you are new to open source. Librarians who read it and hear the poetry behind the details will realize that open source works very much like we do.
community	In the open source world, there is much talk about the “community” of users and developers of the software. Both Evergreen and Koha have active communities. Effectively, these software projects and their development courses are directed by the community through email lists, IRC channels, and an array of communications mechanisms.
compiled	Describes a program once it has been translated into computer language. It is usually not human readable. Proprietary software in the library world will usually only be available in a compiled format. In contrast, open source software is normally available as source code which is downloaded and compiled by its users. Hence, the underlying code can be read by the users of open source software and modified to suit their needs, if desired.
Equinox Software, Inc.	The company founded by the developers of Evergreen. Its website is at: http://www.esilibrary.com/
Evergreen	The first ILS designed to handle the processing of geographically dispersed, resource-sharing library networks. Evergreen is the open source software that runs a growing number of libraries and consortia. Its website is at: http://www.evergreen-ils.org/ and the Wikipedia entry gives more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_(software). It first went live in 2006 at the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
FOSS or FLOSS	Free (Libre) open source Software
Free software	Free software is not to be confused with open source software although the two often have similar objectives, they do not always. See the Free Software Definition at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for a discussion of the philosophy behind free software. For a discussion of the differences in philosophy between Free software and open source software, see Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html. The Wikipedia entry for the Free software movement is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement.
FUD	Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Do you want to trust your library’s functions to open source software written by a bunch of tattooed, dope-smoking hippies with orange hair? FUD, as the example above might demonstrate, is a useful marketing tool for sellers of proprietary software. By instilling FUD in prospective users about the viability, robustness, and support of open source competitors, proprietary vendors can make an open-source project with hundreds of developers and excellent support seem like a casual basement project for a few hobbyist programmers.
FulfILLment ™	FulfILLment is being developed by Equinox Software, Inc. under contract with OHIONET. It is an open source project designed to link library catalogs. When completed in about two years, it will provide library users seamless access to materials owned by libraries using FulfILLment-no matter which integrated library system his or her library uses. The project’s website is: http://fulfillment-ill.org/
GPL	The GNU General Public License is an open source license that is used by Evergreen and Koha as well as most open source applications. There are various versions of the GPL and other kinds of open source licenses. The GNU Project’s website: http://www.gnu.org/. The discussion of its licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html. Wikipedia’s article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL.
GPLS	Georgia Public Library Service, the state library of Georgia. GPLS administers the PINES network and is where Evergreen was originally developed. Its website is at: http://www.georgialibraries.org/.
ILS	Integrated Library System. Also known as a Library Management System (LMS). Wikipedia’s entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_library_system.
IndexData	This firm has been active for 15 years in developing software to aid in indexing and searching. It developed the Zebra (http://www.indexdata.com/zebra) search engine used by Koha, as well as other applications. Evergreen also uses components developed by IndexData including ZOOM, among others. Its website is at: http://www.indexdata.com/.
Koha	An open source ILS created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand. The Trust was set up in December 1996 to provide library service in Horowhenua District on North Island, New Zealand. The main library is in Levin. “Koha” is a Maori word for “gift.” Another gift from these two organizations is Kete, which is software for community collaboration and otherwise outside the scope of this glossary. The community website is http://koha-community.org/ and more information on its history can be found at http://koha-community.org/about/ and at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koha_(software). It first went live in 2000. The first U.S. library to run an open source ILS was the Nelsonville (Ohio) Public Library which went live with Koha in October, 2003. For a bit of history see the detailed A Koha Diary (http://www.kohadocs.org/koha_diary.html) or the shorter The Koha Project (http://www.myacpl.org/?q=about/koha) Koha is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later. Free and paid support options for Koha are listed here: http://koha-community.org/support/
LMS	Library Management System. Also known as an Integrated Library System (ILS).
migration	If you change ILS vendors, your library’s data will have to be moved from one vendors’ database structures to another’s. Patron, transaction, and bibliographic records will have to be moved. This is normally not a process undertaken lightly. If the data are in a proprietary database, do you own your data so you can migrate them?
MySQL	MySQL is a relational database management system that is used by Koha. Koha version 3.4 will add PostgreSQL support. The company that developed the software and released the code under the GPL is now owned by Sun Microsystems, owned, in turn, by Oracle, a commercial vendor of relational database software. Wikipedia entry: MySQL
OpenSRF	Open Service Request Framework, pronounced “open surf.” This is the software architecture at the core of the Evergreen ILS and the FulfILLment consortial borrowing platform. Invented by the developers of Evergreen, OpenSRF provides transparent load balancing, high-availability and abstraction features to applications, allowing developers to focus on functionality instead of infrastructure.
open source	Open source is a number of things. It is a class of licenses, a culture, a community, and a way of producing and sharing software. It is not to be confused with free software, although the two movements share many objectives. In these senses, it is normally distinguished from proprietary licenses or software. Software produced by this method is released under an open source license like the GPL and the source code is freely available. There are a number of open source licenses. Generally, these licenses permit users to adapt, make changes, and improve software. The GPL, used by Evergreen and Koha, is a bit stricter than some other open source licenses and, among other things, also requires the adapted software be released through a GPL license. The website of the Open Source Initiative is at http://opensource.org/. The Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software Open source is relatively new to the library world. One normally speaks of the alternative proprietary vendors as “legacy” or “traditional” vendors.
open source software advantages:	* Easy customization for your own local situation. If there is not much interest in the community for a capability you require, you can develop it on your own or hire someone to add that capability. * If there are support companies to support an open source application, such applications will have about the same support levels as one finds with vendors of proprietary software. * Fast development - “release early, release often” * Cost-it’s free.
open source software disadvantages:	* Who supports it if you can’t? * It’s free but it may not be cheap.
OSS	open source software
OSS4lib	A website that maintains a listing of free software and systems designed for libraries but is broader in focus than the ILS/LMS focus of this glossary. It was started in 1999. Its website is at: http://www.oss4lib.org/
PINES	The Georgia statewide public library resource sharing network. It currently has about 50 systems, 275 libraries, and circulates about 17 million items a year. Evergreen software runs PINES. It was the first system to use Evergreen. The PINES catalog searches the largest installation of Evergreen that circulates over 17 million items a year from the 10 million item collection. The PINES web home is at http://pines.georgialibraries.org/ and a short history 10 Years of PINES provides a retrospective on PINES.
PostgreSQL	PostgreSQL, sometimes shortened to “Postgres,” is a powerful, open source relational database system that is used in Evergreen. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. To learn more about PostgreSQL visit http://www.postgresql.org/. Wikipedia’s entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
proprietary	A method for producing software that is normally distinguished from open source software. Proprietary software is not normally distributed as source code but as compiled programs so that one cannot see what the code does. It would normally be only supported by the company that manufactured it which can lead to vendor lockin. Since users cannot see the code, they cannot easily make permanent improvements or changes in it and have to wait for the next release.
proprietary software advantages:	* Supported by the company you buy it from (can be good) * Normally turnkey * Support and documentation is said to be better than open source * You don’t have to worry your pretty little head about your software. * It has, historically, been a successful model. If it weren’t for companies using this model, many libraries would still be using card catalogs.
proprietary software disadvantages:	* Supported by the company you buy it from (can be bad if it is the only option because of potential vendor lockin.) * Slow development cycle which may have difficulty balancing the requirements of various users. For instance, what happens if your vendor will not develop something you require? * Some vendors have been bought by firms that don’t know the industry and support and development have suffered.
Service Oriented Architecture	A software architecture based on a collection of loosely-coupled, distributed services which communicate and interoperate via agreed standards. OpenSRF is an example of Service Oriented Architecture.
source code	“…any sequence of statements and/or declarations written in some human-readable computer programming language.” (Wikipedia). This is the code as it is written by the developers. Before it can be run on computers, it must be compiled into language that these computers can read.
Turnkey	Of software, an application or suite of applications that a vendor sets up and all you have to do is turn the key and you are in business.
Vaporware	Software that does not exist…but has been promised.
Vendor lockin	If you buy from a proprietary vendor, it is protected from competition for your business by 1) your multi-year contract, and 2) from the challenges of data migration.
Zebra	A high-performance indexing and retrieval engine used by Koha as its primary search system for bibliographic and authority data. Zebra was created by IndexData and is licensed under the GPL. For more information, see: http://www.indexdata.com/zebra.

Version note: This HTML version of the glossary is a revision of the content most recently published in PDF on the Equinox blog on June 2, 2010. The changes are: the new formatting, small bits of wordsmithing, and more information as various entries have been expanded. This version is now the master copy.

Bob Molyneux

June 23, 2010

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.

Many of you have undoubtedly seen previous drafts of this article as I worked on it over the past three or four months, but I'm pleased to say that the Easing Gently into OpenSRF article has now been officially published by the code4lib Journal. The goal of the article is to introduce the OpenSRF infrastructure for building applications on a scale-out architecture -- which is a high-faluting mouthful -- using a 10-line Perl module that implements a standalone OpenSRF service as the entry point. Along the way, the article covers a little bit of the Evergreen-specific functionality that is built on top of OpenSRF; hopefully enough to act as a teaser for follow-on articles in the future. My naked desire is to get more development talent to join us at the OpenSRF + Evergreen tables. The buffet is rich and the food (and available tasks) are plentiful!

I would be remiss if I did not profusely thank my editors, Jonathan Rochkind and Gabriel Farrell, for their probing questions, requests for more content and examples, and suggestions. They helped shape a much more comprehensive and useful article than I would have produced on my own.

Glossary of terms related to Evergreen and open source in general.  Created by Equinox Software, Inc. (ESI).  I found it on the Evergreen Indiana website.

6/22/10 Update:  Thanks to Bob Molyneux for directing me to the most current version of this glossary:  

http://blog.esilibrary.com/2010/06/23/an-open-source-ils-glossary-html-format/

I've "unattached" the older one from this thread so as to avoid confusion.

Curious about the latest developments in the Acquisitions module?  Tomorrow, you can get an in-depth tour of Acquisitions in our Acquisitions Preview class! Staff in a variety of libraries and institutions, including public, academic, and special libraries, will find this module to be a valuable addition to the Evergreen ILS. In this session, we’ll discuss how to select items for purchase, create purchase orders, upload bibliographic records and holdings, manage funds, and invoice and claim items. This class is offered online from 1pm-2:30pm on Wednesday, June 16. The cost of the course is only $115 per person. To find more information or to register, contact training@esilibrary.com.

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