In June of 2009 I was moaning about how Evergreen, by default, has no identifier index for limiting searches by ISBN / ISSN / LCCN / OCLCnum and that if [fixing this problem] requires work from me, it will probably be 2010 before any of it happens. Due to some of the tools our consortium relies on, we really needed a solution for identifier searches in Z39.50 that was better than just a general keyword search: we were returning too many false positives that cause extra work and frustration for everyone.

Well, here it is, 2010, and as of today Conifer's Evergreen server now has a very handy identifier index. Most of the required pieces were already there, in one form or another, but they all needed to be brought together. This blog post is going to try to do that (and serve as documentation for my ever-decaying brain, too). At the time of this post, we're running a 1.6.0.4-ish Evergreen system; you'll need to be running 1.6.0.4 to get ISSN searching to work properly, too.

First, we need to create the identifier index. Evergreen comes with the following indexes out of the box:

• author
• title
• series
• subject
• keyword

Pretty standard. With the exception of keyword, each of these indexes is composed of more granular indexes; for example, the title index is composed of the following specific indexes, with the XML format that the MARCXML is converted to and then the XPath expression that extracts the text from the pertinent XML format:

• abbreviated - MODS32 - //mods32:mods/mods32:titleInfo[mods32:title and (@type='abbreviated')]
• translated - MODS32 - //mods32:mods/mods32:titleInfo[mods32:title and (@type='translated')]
• alternative - MODS32 - //mods32:mods/mods32:titleInfo[mods32:title and (@type='alternative')]
• uniform - MODS32 - //mods32:mods/mods32:titleInfo[mods32:title and (@type='uniform')]
• proper - MODS32 - //mods32:mods/mods32:titleInfo[mods32:title and (@type='proper')]

Aside: You can search against these more granular indexes in the Evergreen OPAC, by the way, by appending the granular index name to the index class name with a | as a delimiter. For example, a search query of title|uniform: canada will search only the uniform titles for the term "canada". Okay, sorry for that detour, but I bet you weren't aware of that - we haven't done a good job of exposing some of the magic that has been there for a long time in Evergreen in the OPAC interface.

Back to understanding the configuration - as you can see above, the conversion to MODS does the heavy lifting in pulling out the fields of interest to us from the MARCXML. The full set of indexed fields and their definitions is visible in the database via the query:

SELECT * FROM config.metabib_field;

For our purposes, we're interested in pulling the raw 010 (LCCN), 020 (ISBN), and 022 (ISSN) a subfields directly from the MARCXML source. Our first step is to add an entry to the config.metabib_field table defining our new index. We'll create a new granular index under the "keyword" index class and call it "identifier", because that's what it is, right? That's as easy as:

INSERT INTO config.metabib_field (field_class, name, xpath, weight, format, search_field, facet_field)
  VALUES ('keyword', 'identifier',
     '//marcxml:datafield[@tag="010" or @tag="020" or @tag="022"]/marcxml:subfield[@code="a"]', 
    1, 'marcxml', true, false
);

Next, we need to restart the open-ils.storage and open-ils.ingest services to make them aware of this new entry. Go ahead, I'll wait while you run osrf_ctl.sh -a restart_perl or use opensrf-perl.pl to restart the services individually. Done? Good.

We have to make up for lost time, now, as all of the bibliographic records in your system didn't have this definition in place when they were first ingested. The easiest thing to do is to just pull the pertinent data directly from the metabib.full_rec view (which is a shredded version of the source MARCXML from your bibliographic records, with one tag/subfield value per row. Ergo:

-- Get the ID from the row that you just inserted for the new index;
-- we'll use this in the INSERT statement
SELECT id 
  FROM config.metabib_field
  WHERE field_class = 'keyword' AND name = 'identifier'
;

-- Let's say the ID was 18; we'll use that to identify the index in the SELECT statement
INSERT INTO metabib.keyword_field_entry (field, source, value)
  SELECT 18, record, agg_text(value) 
  FROM metabib.full_rec
  WHERE tag IN ('010', '020', '022')
  AND subfield = 'a'
  GROUP BY 1, 2
;

All right! Now you can run some test searches in the OPAC for ISSNs, ISBNs, and LCCNs in your OPAC using the keyword|identifier: some_identifier prefix. Cool. So that's part one, mostly lifted from the "magic spell" in the Evergreen wiki.

Part two is configuring SRU to use the new identifier index. The bulk of the Evergreen SRU implementation is contained in the Perl module OpenILS::WWW::SuperCat.pm (located in your install directory in /openils/lib/perl5/OpenILS/Application/SuperCat.pm). Get out your patch tool or open up the Perl module in a text editor, we're going to make a few changes. The pertinent diff follows:

--- old/OpenILS/WWW/SuperCat.pm        2010-03-09 17:26:20.000000000 -0500
+++ new/OpenILS/WWW/SuperCat.pm     2010-03-10 00:11:58.000000000 -0500
@@ -1410,6 +1410,7 @@
     'bib.titlealternative'  => 'title',
     'bib.titleseries'       => 'series',
     'eg.series'             => 'title',
+    'eg.identifier'             => 'keyword|identifier',
 
     # Author/Name class:
     'eg.author'             => 'author',
@@ -1438,7 +1439,7 @@
     'srw.serverchoice'      => 'keyword',
 
     # Identifiers:
-    'dc.identifier'         => 'keyword',
+    'dc.identifier'         => 'keyword|identifier',
 
     # Dates:
     'bib.dateissued'        => undef,
@@ -1497,6 +1498,7 @@
                        subject         => ['subject'],
                        keyword         => ['keyword'],
                        series          => ['series'],
+                       identifier      => ['keyword|identifier'],
                },
                dc => {
                        title           => ['title'],
@@ -1504,7 +1506,7 @@
                        contributor     => ['author'],
                        publisher       => ['keyword'],
                        subject         => ['subject'],
-                       identifier      => ['keyword'],
+                       identifier      => ['keyword|identifier'],
                        type            => [undef],
                        format          => [undef],
                        language        => ['lang'],

Essentially, we've defined a new qualifier (eg.identifier) and pointed it and the dc.identifier indexes at the new, more specific keyword|identifier index. Once the updated file is in place, reload your Apache configuration (/etc/init.d/apache reload) and SRU requests using those qualifiers will now point at the identifier index. FABULOUS.

Our last step is to teach our simple2zoom-based Z39.50 configuration about the new index by mapping the corresponding BIB-1 attributes to the new eg.identifier qualifier, like so:

   <database name="FOOBAR">
     <zurl>http://localhost/opac/extras/sru/FOOBAR/holdings</zurl>
     get
     <charset>marc-8</charset>
     <search>
       <querytype>cql</querytype>
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
     </search>
   </database>

Kill your simple2zoom processes and restart simple2zoom and you should be in heaven - farewell, false positive matches! Oh, and about that SFX target parser for Evergreen; now you can remove all of the gimmickry around exact searches and worrying about ISSNs that contain an 'X' and just point at the identifier index. For example:

  if (defined($ISSN)) {
    $searchString .= "keyword|identifier: $ISSN";
  } 
  elsif (defined($ISBN)) {
    $ISBN =~ s/-//g; # Most of our ISBNs are normalized to no hyphens
    $searchString .= "keyword|identifier: $ISBN";
  }

Things still aren't perfect in Evergreen identifier-land: we still need to do some work to normalize hyphenation of our ISBNs, for example, and ensure we have 10-digit & 13-digit ISBN equivalents. But we're a lot closer to perfection now - and with the work that Mike Rylander is doing in trunk, normalization of that kind should be relatively straightforward to implement on both the indexing and query-parsing side.

A lot of you are coming from far-lung lands, or at least Indiana, and have never been to West Michigan. I am sure that you have an image of what Grand Rapids is like — is it conservative Dutch people? Farms next to a big lake? A little town full of Amway salespeople?

Grand Rapids tends to surprise people. We are a medium size city (200,000 in the city, 1.5 million in West MI). We have a passion for the arts–Grand Rapids is home to Michigan’s only professional ballet company, has the first gold-LEED certified Art Museum in the world, is home to the nation’s largest art contest, ArtPrize. We are huge foodies (no pun intended) and have great restaurants. We are committed to sustainable living and green initiatives.  GR is a friendly, walkable, fun city – your evenings here will be filled with hopping local pubs, unique meals, great performances, or just chilling in your plush hotel room.

Got any questions before your trip? Post them here.

UPDATE 2010-03-05 I just backported Warren's patch for sorting Z39.50 servers to rel_1_6_0 (it counts as a bug fix), so expect to see it in the Evergreen 1.6.0.4 release. Yay!

In Evergreen 1.6, Z39.50 target server configuration (for copy-cataloguing targets) moves into the database. This makes it pretty easy for sites to share their Z39.50 target servers with one another.

I recently added a number of target servers to our configuration, and thought that other academic Evergreen sites might be interested in our set (because we're primarily pointing at other academic libraries) - particularly if they haven't added many of their own yet. You can find a PostgreSQL dump of our current configuration in the ILS-Contrib repository at conifer/branches/rel_1_6_0/tools/config/config_z3950.sql.

I generated this dump of the data using the following command:

pg_dump --data-only --table config.z3950_source --table config.z3950_attr evergreen > config_z3950.sql

(where evergreen is the name of the Evergreen database, naturally!). You should be able to load the data into a clean Evergreen database via psql inside a transaction as follows:

BEGIN;
\i config_z3950.sql
COMMIT;

If you already have other Z39.50 servers in your database configuration, you might need to adjust the ID values in the config.z3950_attr rows. Just prepending a 1 to them ought to do the trick, unless you have masses of Z39.50 servers. In which case, you probably don't need ours!

Oh, one final tip: when you start adding a bunch of Z39.50 target servers, you'll notice that the order in the Import from Z39.50 screen is random; it will drive your cataloguers crazy. Quite some time ago, Warren Layton from Natural Resources Canada submitted a patch for sorting the servers alphabetically that has been committed to trunk and the 1.6 branch, but which hasn't made its way into a 1.6.0 release yet. If, at the time you're reading this, you're on a 1.6 release but your list isn't sorted, get the file and drop it into /openils/var/web/xul/server/cat/z3950.js - your cataloguers will thank you. You, in turn, can thank Warren.

Grand Rapids is a great walking town.  There’s a lot packed into a little space, and EG2010 will be right at the heart of it.  While a 10 or 15 minute walk will get you pretty much anywhere you’d want to go, we never know what April in Michigan will be like.  So, our friends at ByWater Solutions have graciously sponsored some transportation on Thursday evening.  Hop aboard the Grand Rapids Trolley Company’s shuttle to and from a reception at the Grand Rapids Public Library, or out to your favorite dine around location.

FYI

Here is Equinox's press release about the launch of Bibliomation's Development Partners Project:

"First Bibliomation Libraries Live on Evergreen"

--Amy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA -March 4, 2010

Beacon Falls Public Library and Douglas Library of Hebron are the first members of Connecticut's Bibliomation consortium to go live with the Evergreen open source ILS. Bibliomation opted to begin the move to Evergreen with a set of five pilot libraries. Slater Public Library, Windham Free Public Library, and Jonathan Trumbull Library will complete the initial group and are expected live at a later date. The entire consortium is expected live on Evergreen in 2011.

Beacon Falls Public Library has a collection of 15,430 bibliographic items and the library serves 3,152 patrons. Douglas Library of Hebron has a collection of 42,298 bibliographic items and the library serves 5,140 patrons.

According to Amy Terlaga, Assistant Director,User Services for Bibliomation, "Evergreen is the perfect library system for a consortium like Bibliomation. We're very excited to be bringing up the first Connecticut libraries on this extremely flexible open source ILS. For some of these development partner libraries, Evergreen will be their first automated system. We can't wait to migrate the entire Bibliomation network sometime in 2011. It can't come soon enough for us!"

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, says "We are thrilled to have the first Bibliomation libraries up and running on Evergreen. They have approached the move to open source with such enthusiasm and continue to be a huge voice of support for the open source community."

About Bibliomation

Founded in 1980, Bibliomation has grown into the largest of the Connecticut networks. They operate as a member driven, non-profit organization with 48 public libraries, 23 K-12 libraries, and 5 development partner libraries across the state. Bibliomation provides a wide array of information, telecommunications, and automation services in order to serve the ever changing technological needs of the network's member libraries. For more information about Bibliomation, please visit http://www.biblio.org/.

About Evergreen

Evergreen is a robust, highly scalable, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.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, 678-269-6113

Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

Let's pretend your national library asked you to submit a set of records with holdings representing all of the various formats in your library system. Let's also pretend that you're really lucky and you're running Evergreen. Here's what you would do to get one example of each combination of item type, item form, bibliographic level, literary form, cataloguing form, and video recording format into a scratch table for a given library (ID = 103) in your system:

CREATE TABLE scratchpad.osul_export (record BIGINT); 

INSERT INTO scratchpad.osul_export 
  SELECT record FROM (
    SELECT DISTINCT ON (mrd.item_type, mrd.item_form, mrd.bib_level, mrd.lit_form, mrd.cat_form, mrd.vr_format) 
        mrd.record, mrd.item_type, mrd.item_form, mrd.bib_level, mrd.lit_form, mrd.cat_form, mrd.vr_format 
    FROM biblio.record_entry bre 
      INNER JOIN asset.call_number acn ON acn.record = bre.id 
      INNER JOIN asset.copy ac ON ac.call_number = acn.id
      INNER JOIN metabib.rec_descriptor mrd ON mrd.record = bre.id 
    WHERE bre.deleted IS FALSE AND acn.deleted IS FALSE AND ac.deleted IS FALSE AND acn.owning_lib = 103
    ORDER BY mrd.item_type, mrd.item_form, mrd.bib_level, mrd.lit_form, mrd.cat_form, mrd.vr_format
  ) AS formats
  ORDER BY record;

And then, because you were asked to provide a total of 2000 records for this representative sample, you might fill up the remaining 1800 records as follows:

INSERT INTO scratchpad.osul_export
  SELECT bre.id 
  FROM biblio.record_entry bre
    INNER JOIN asset.call_number acn ON acn.record = bre.id
    INNER JOIN asset.copy ac ON ac.call_number = acn.id
    INNER JOIN reporter.super_simple_record rsr ON rsr.id = bre.id
  WHERE bre.deleted IS FALSE AND acn.deleted IS FALSE AND ac.deleted IS FALSE AND acn.owning_lib = 103
    AND bre.id NOT IN (
      SELECT record
        FROM scratchpad.osul_export
    ) AND substring(bre.id::text from (length(bre.id::text)) for 1)::int = 8
    AND bre.id % 17 = 0
  ORDER BY rsr.author DESC
  LIMIT 1800;

... which, of course, gives you the records with a record ID ending in '8' and (to whittle it down further) records where record ID modulo 17 is 0 - and finally, just the first 1800 records ordered by author name in descending order.

All of this will give you 2000 record IDs in scratchpad.osul_export that you can then extract into a text file and feed into Evergreen's Open-ILS/src/support-scripts/marc_export script to dump the MARC records with holdings in the 852 field from your system. Beautiful, eh?

Before you book your flight to Grand Rapids, make sure you take a look at Wednesday’s events and include them in your conference plans!

We’re kicking off the day with the hackfest Hands-on Coding for Developers.  After lunch on your own, you’ll have three hackfests to choose from, Hands-on Coding for Developers continued, DIG: Evergreen Documentation Interest Group Discussion, and Sys-Admin Survival Skills.  Meetings with the developers will happen during the afternoon as well (sign up for your personal time slot on the conference website).  We’re also hoping to squeeze into the afternoon some roundtable discussions on holds and on reports, so stay tuned for more details on those.  Following the hackfests you’ll have the opportunity to attend a forum on the Evergreen Foundation.  The Exhibitors Reception can’t be missed (we recently chose the hors d’oeuvres and, boy, will they wet your appetite!), and we’ll cap the evening with a pub crawl, taking in the world renowned HopCat!

And all this is included in your conference registration, so book an early flight t0 Grand Rapids!

The Beacon Falls Public Library went live this morning on BibliOak, Bibliomation's Development Partner Evergreen system. Beacon Falls is the first Connecticut library to go live on Evergreen. The Douglas Library of Hebron will quickly follow them next Monday, March 8th.

Kate Sheehan, our open source implementation coordinator, is spending the entire day with Beacon Falls library staff to help them get more comfortable with using this new whiz-bang open source ILS.

To check out our BibliOak Evergreen web catalog, click here

We here at Bibliomation couldn't be more thrilled for them!

The Bibliomation Open Source Team:
Melissa Lefebvre, Open Source Project Manager
Benjamin Shum, Open Source Software Coordinator
Kate Sheehan, Open Source Implementation Coordinator
-in conjunction with-
Mary Llewellyn, Database Services Manager
Robin Fitch, Cataloger and Trainer
Carol Yarrison, Help Desk Coordinator and Circulation Trainer
Jessica Venturo, Applications Support Specialist and Trainer

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA- March 3, 2010

Natural Resources Canada Library (NRCan), has gone live with the second phase of their migration to Evergreen, the consortial open-source library automation software. Equinox Software Inc., the support and development company for Evergreen, oversaw the migration and is providing ongoing 24/7 technical support. This new set of libraries joins those from the first phase of migrations which was completed over the summer. The NRCan Libraries, which had been using two separate integrated library systems, opted to migrate in phased deployments. There are now approximately 500,000 bibliographic records on the new combined catalog.

With thirteen government libraries located across the country, NRCan seeks to enhance the responsible development and use of Canada's natural resource through their goal of shared service initiatives between the government's IT staff, agency departments, and outside vendor partnerships.

According to George Duimovich, Manager of Library Applications for NRCan, "Evergreen is particularly well suited to the government library context. There are a number of 'shared services' initiatives in government IT, and being on the Evergreen platform has definite advantages for libraries which need flexibility and unrestricted partnership possibilities. At a time when the role of government libraries is being re-examined, we're able to maintain a level of innovation and change in tune with the circumstances, engaging both internal IT resources as well as independent, competitively sourced vendor support when required."

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox, says "Government libraries have unique challenges and needs when considering an ILS. The flexibility of Evergreen made it an ideal choice for NRCan and the added convenience of now having all libraries running on the same system will be a huge benefit."

About Evergreen

Evergreen is a robust, highly scalable, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.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, 678-269-6113

Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 3, Issue 1 – January/February 2010

As a reminder, we post this newsletter to the Evergreen general discussion list, development list, and the Evergreen blog. Cross-posting and forwarding are encouraged.

In This Issue

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Development and Documentation Update, Evergreen People, Evergreen Libraries, Evergreen Jobs, Evergreen Statistics, New Evergreen Libraries, Planet Evergreen, A Few Reminders, Newsletter Administrivia

Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

Do you know of Evergreen events you’d like to share here? Please contact us at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Conferences

The 2010 Evergreen International Conference will be held April 21-23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids Michigan. The Conference website contains general information, schedule, exhibitor information, sponsorship information, a link to the Grand Rapids Convention and Visitors Bureau, a link to the Amway for online reservations, and a link to the registration site. Please join us for an exciting 3 days of learning, sharing, networking, and fun in Grand Rapids! http://www.evergreen2010.org/

Equinox will be exhibiting Evergreen at PLA2010 (booth 1407) in Portland from March 23-27, and also at TLA in San Antonia from April 14-17.

Classes

Equinox

Equinox Software, Inc. is now offering training for Evergreen users. For more information or to register, send an email to training@esilibrary.com

Currently, Equinox Software is offering the following classes:

<html>

Acquisitions Preview

March 31 — 1pm-3pm EST

In this class, we will review the plans for the Acquisitions module, examine current functionality, and tour the most recent development. This class would be useful to administrators, prospective Evergreen users, and others interested in Acquisitions development.

The Evergreen OPAC

April 7 — 1pm-2pm EST

In this session, we will explore the Evergreen OPAC from the perspective of both patrons and staff members. This class would be useful to front line information services staff.

Circulation in Evergreen (Part 1)

April 12 — 1pm-2:30pm EST

In this session, we will focus on patron services in the Evergreen circulation module. This class would be of interest to front line circulation staff.

Circulation in Evergreen (Part 2)

April 27 — 11:30am-1pm EST

In this session, we will focus on item management in the Evergreen circulation module. This class would be of interest to front line circulation staff.

Booking in Evergreen

April 29 — 11:00am-12pm EST

In this session, we will focus on booking in Evergreen. We will discuss how to create and pick up reservations for bibliographic items. We will also discuss the reservation process for other item types, such as laptops and meeting rooms.

</html>

Lyrasis

<html>

Evergreen Cataloging Module (Live Online)

3/3/2010-3/4/2010 2:00pm-4:00pm EST

Evergreen Administration and Reports Module (Live Online)

3/10/2010, 10:00am-12:00pm EST

</html>

LYRASIS (created from a merger of SOLINET, PALINET and NELINET) has taught dozens of Evergreen classes. Lyrasis is dedicated to training and instructing Evergreen, and they welcome your comments and suggestions for courses. All of their current course offerings are continuously updated, and Lyrasis plans to add more courses in the future. For comments or questions, contact Lyrasis instructors Jennifer.Bielewski@lyrasis.org or Jenny.Liberatore@lyrasis.org

In the past, so how did it go?

* February 22, 2010 – Evergreen was the focus of an afternoon pre-conference for CODE4LIB 2010.

* February 24, 2010 – Customizing and Extending Evergreen: a guide for geeks is a half-day workshop that Dan Scott lead at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference.

Evergreen Development and Documentation Update

New Releases

A new bugfix release of Evergreen, version 1.6.0.2, was released on February 18th. It includes many fixes and updated translations, including new translations for English (UK), Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. For a complete list of the new fixes and features, see http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature_list_1_6_0

On February 8th, a new version of OpenSRF was released, version 1.2.2, which includes important fixes for high traffic environments. If you are running Evergreen 1.6+ you are strongly encouraged to upgrade!

A peek in the Trunk

This is a look at some of the current differences between trunk and the 1.6 branch. It’s not comprehensive. Most of these features need testing, feedback, and/or polish, but may one day get backported to 1.6 or show up in the next major branch release.

Cataloging

Bucket Notes

Toward allowing arbitrary notes for buckets and bookbags.

Copy Location Order

Allows you to define display positions for copy/shelving locations. No longer has to be in alphabetical order.

Mint Condition flag for Holds and Copies

Optionally allows us to give a “good quality” or “mint condition” or “pristine” or “complete with all pieces” type designation to items, and allows holds to optionally be filled only by items in that condition.

Update leader in MARC record when deleting or undeleting the record

This sets the leader/05 appropriately.

Circ

Auto Checkout-attempt into renewal

If an item is already checked out to a user and the circulation is past a configured auto-renewal interval, attempt to treat the transaction as a renewal instead. Option for doing this with offline transactions as well.

Backdating

Action for backdating checkins that have already happened (e.g. checkin the item, notice that you should have backdated, and then do so after the fact)

“Scan time” field shows the true time that an item was checked in, regardless of backdating. We also record the specific workstation for all checkins.

Billable Transaction Summary with Billing Location

An augmented view of billable transaction summaries. Toward filtering by location in the billing interface.

Cap Max Fine at Item Price

Org-unit setting for capping fines at the item price. Existing Percent of Item Price functionality for fine caps trumps this setting.

Circ Counts By Year

Reportable abstraction of this data.

Circulation “Chain” Summaries

In Evergreen, renewals show up as circulations, though you’re able to select or filter for these based on renewal flags on the circs. Circulation chains allow us to group together a logical sequence of original checkout and subsequent renewals as one entity.

Circulation permit check based on claims returned threshold

Allows you to set a number for how many claims returned items are allowed on a patron’s account before requiring override for new checkouts.

Circulation receipts

Can now include patron money summary information (amount owed, etc.) in checkout receipts.

Credit Card Payments

We’re able to interface with Paypal for taking credit card payments.

Custom copy status for returned items

Allows you to designate a copy status for post-claims returned items.

Fine generation

An Evergreen installation normally has a periodic process for generating fines. To supplement that, we now generate fines for a given circulation at the time of checkin, to handle certain boundary conditions.

Floating Collections

Basic support for floating collections where items can stay where they land.

History Buckets

For supporting clearable patron and/or staff facing record of checkouts.

Hold Request Cancel/Un-Cancel

Interface toggle and related org unit settings for showing and manipulating canceled holds.

Hold Request Notes

Free-text staff notes that can optionally be printed on hold slips.

Hold retargeting trigged by certain copy updates

Checks to see if an item status change warrants a retargeting of related hold requests.

Negative Balance list

Dedicated interface for listing patrons with negative balances.

Offline username

Org-unit setting for treating patron barcodes in offline transactions as usernames based on barcode format.

Patron Claims

Can mark a circulation as Claims Never Checked Out, which changes the status to Missing.

Org-unit setting for changing the copy status to something arbitrary for Claims Returned items.

Patron retrieval by internal ID

Config setting which allows retrieval of patrons by their internal DB ID.

Pending Patrons

Staging area for patron data from self-registration, migrations, external systems, etc.

Pre-cat improvements

Circ modifier and ISBN field for pre-cataloged items. The circ modifier will carry over when/if the item is cataloged. And of course, you can create circulation rules based on an item being a pre-cat with consideration of its circ modifier.

Org-unit setting for setting the circ lib of a pre-cat. For example, you could checkout a pre-cat item at BR1, but have it’s circ lib be BR2, so that upon checkin, it’ll transit to BR2.

Top of Queue flag for Hold Requests

Brings a hold to the front of the line, or at least next to other Top of Queue holds.

Misc

Events interfaces

View (and in some cases Edit or Cancel) triggered events for patrons and copies. These can include notices, etc.

Setting Types

Better support for defining/categorizing different user and org unit settings.

Ubuntu Karmic

Pre-requisite installer target for Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala distribution.

Evergreen People

Dan Scott, Systems Librarian at Laurentian University, will be flying down to Connecticut in February to teach Bibliomation staff how to write postgreSQL queries for the Evergreen system. Dan is tailoring his lesson plan to Bibliomation’s specific reporting needs. Dan will be contributing his course materials to the Evergreen community. Class dates – February 18th and 19th.

Bibliomation, King County Library System, the SITKA Libraries (British Columbia), and the PINES Library System (GPLS) have partnered with the Seattle-based web design firm, FGI, to develop some functional specifications and a project plan for an Evergreen children’s catalog. This catalog will have graphical images to guide children to the appropriate reading material. FGI is the same company that KCLS is currently using to design the new interface for the Evergreen adult web catalog. For more information, you can email Amy Terlaga at Bibliomation (terlaga@biblio.org).

Evergreen Libraries

The Ontario Library Association (OLA) awarded two of its 2010 OLA and OLA Divisional awards to Project Conifer:
– The Ontario College and University Library Association (OCULA) Special Achievement Award
– The Ontario Library Information Technology Association (OLITA) Award for Technical Innovation

These rewards recognize not only on the partner libraries that are part of Project Conifer, but the entire Evergreen community without which Project Conifer could never have happened.

Evergreen Jobs

Equinox is currently looking for a Project Manager.

Do you know of Evergreen related jobs that you’d like to share here? Let us know at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Evergreen Statistics

By Bob Molyneux

<html>

Summary Data for Evergreen Library Installations, by year
New libraries by year					New Public Libraries by year
					Public Libraries
								Total
	Systems	Outlets			Systems	Outlets	Pop served	Circulations
2006	46	248			45	246	4,564,757	17,177,872
2007	4	8			4	8	67,658	319,871
2008	39	89			37	87	962,758	6,943,043
2009	98	199			75	149	1,687,924	10,725,430
Total Evergreen prior to 2010	187	544			161	490	7,283,097	35,166,216

</html>

Evergreen has grown rapidly and I have been keeping track as best I can by maintaining a list of the libraries running Evergreen that I can identify and, where possible, integrating that list with published national-level or provincial data.

The first table (New Libraries by Year) summarizes this growth. Bear in mind that there are uncertainties about some details and most of the published data are for 2007 so “outlets” (central library + branches + bookmobiles) may have changed but the count of systems is current.

We can see here that in 2006, the first 46 (including the State Library) systems in PINES migrated to Evergreen. There were 248 outlets by my count—not org units as Evergreen users usually report.

2007 was a slow year—the calm before the storm—with 4 new public library systems using Evergreen. This year also saw the first non-PINES libraries go live in British Columbia in what is now called SITKA.

In 2008, the pace quickend with 39 systems and 89 outlets. The first academics went live with Evergreen this year with the University of PEI.

2009 was crazy. 98 systems and 199 outlets ran Evergreen for the first time. Conifer also went live so the number of academics also increased. Conifer also has a number of academic special libraries such as health and law libraries.

The total at the end of the 2009 was 187 systems and 544 outlets using Evergreen.

Most of these are still public libraries. The second table (New Public Libraries by Year) has some summary data from these public libraries. Public library data are about the best we have; academic data are fragmentary. There are two numbers that public librarians will cite: population service and total annual circulations. What I have done here is to total these numbers from the latest figures (mostly 2007) for the libraries using Evergreen. 2007, as you can see had those four small systems go live. As I have pointed out numerous times, the story of Evergreen is a story of small public libraries but in a scalable environment. Each year since then, more libraries, more types of libraries, and bigger entities have chosen Evergreen.

Wait until this year: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

* Natural Resources Canada Library completed its second and final phase of their migration on January 15, 2010. Their 13 locations across Canada are now all running Evergreen.

* SC LENDS in South Carolina welcomed three new libraries to their Evergreen consortium in January 2010: Anderson County Library, Fairfield County Library, and Florence County Library.

* The Indiana Open Source ILS Initiative has already welcomed five new libraries to their Evergreen consortium since the start of 2010: Greensburg-Decatur County Contractual Public Library, Kirklin Public Library, Ligonier Public Library, Linden-Carnegie Public Library, and Roanoke Public Library.

* Kirtland Community College in Roscommon, MI went live with Evergreen in January 2010.

* SITKA in British Columbia welcomed the Mackenzie Public Library into its consortium on February 25, 2010.

Planet Evergreen

Can’t get enough news about Evergreen open source software? Subscribe to or read Planet Evergreen, an aggregator for Evergreen-related posts. Have a blog that talks about Evergreen? To add your blog to the Planet Evergreen blog aggregator, send email to Dan Scott at dan@coffeecode.net

A Few Reminders

Evergreen has a Flickr set and a Facebook group.

Newsletter Administrivia

Feel free to forward, share, etc.! Jason sits at the top of the blame map, but we have direct edits from:

Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation, Inc., terlaga@biblio.org

Dan Scott, Laurentian University, dan@coffeecode.net

Jason Etheridge, Equinox Software Inc., jason@esilibrary.com

Mike Rylander, Equinox Software Inc.

Warren Layton, NRCan Library / Bibliothèque RNCan

And special thanks to Sally Fortin and Bob Molyneux from Equinox Software Inc. for contributions.

You can reach volunteer newsletter wranglers at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Licensing

This newsletter is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which is an open “copy-left” license similar to that used by Evergreen. If you contribute content that is copyrighted or copyrightable, please let us know if you do not agree to have it released under this license. Thanks!

To summarize the results of the Evergreen developer workshop at the OLA SuperConference, I think things went pretty well. The primary focus this time was on the nuts and bolts of building a minimal OpenSRF service and I saw the lights go on in a number of faces as I broke it down. Things got a little hand-wavy in the final half-hour when I leapt into the Dojo JavaScript widgets that have been custom-built for Evergreen interfaces such as the administration and acquisitions functionality. In retrospect, the first half of the session deserves its own half-day, and the second half of the session similarly deserves its own half-day, and something had to give this time around.

I focused on getting hands-on, and for the most part I think it was a success - although even though I had packaged up a virtual image, we still ran into some problems getting it running on some laptops. And due to some communications problems, about half of the participants weren't ready for a hands-on session (read: no laptop, or a netbook that couldn't handle a virtual image). I have real hopes that we'll see some contributions in the next few months from some of the participants, which would be a huge win for Evergreen.

Without any further ado, here are the materials for the session (all of which are made available to you under a Creative Commons By Attribution-Share-Alike Canada 2.5 license):

• Slides: (OpenOffice.org Impress) (PDF)
• Workshop tutorial: (HTML) (PDF)
• JavaScript and Perl files: OLA_2010_files.zip

Eric Lease Morgan, Head of Digital Access and Information Architecture Department for the University Library of Notre Dame, has been practicing open access publishing and open source software distribution since before the phrases were coined. Both a librarian and computer user, his professional goal is to discover new ways to use computers to increase library collections and improve library services. Some of Lease Morgan’s more notable investigations have surrounded the automatic collection of electronic serials, the indexing of open access content, and the personalization of library websites.  Join us on Friday, April 23, 2010, at 11:00am in the Ambassador Ballroom West of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel for Lease Morgan’s perspective on open source and libraries.

Bill Ptacek, Director of King County Library System, will deliver the conference opening keynote on KCLS and Open Source Library Systems.  KCLS recently received a 3-year, $998,556 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to share current development work on the Open Source Library System (OSLS), Evergreen, with other libraries and to develop resources to make the OSLS a more viable alternative to the traditional Integrated Library System (ILS) for libraries across the nation. Ptacek will discuss the goals of the project and its impact for other Evergreen libraries.  Join us on Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 10:15am in the Ambassador Ballroom West of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel for this intriguing glimpse into Evergreen’s future.

Dan Scott spent two days in February 2010, training Bibliomation HQ staff on how to write SQL queries for their Evergreen system.

He is sharing his course materials with the Evergreen community.

If you have any questions for Dan, you can reach him at dan{at}coffeecode{dot}net.

--Submitted by Amy Terlaga, Assistant Director, User Services, Bibliomation, terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.

Hey all - if you're coming to the Evergreen developer workshop at the OLA SuperConference 2010, there's one thing you can do to prepare. As this is a hands-on workshop (how else can you learn!), I'm hoping many or most of you will have laptops. And ideally, your laptop will have a current version of VirtualBox or VMWare installed on it, as I plan to bring a virtual image for the attendees to use.

I'm hoping the virtual image will sidestep the configuration hassles people seem to run into with installing OpenSRF / Evergreen natively and enable us to just focus on the code and architecture during the limited time we will have together. *sniff*

Well, we just completed two days of intensive SQL training with Dan Scott, and I have to write that it was all we were hoping for and more. Not only did Dan provide us with a comprehensive overview of the basics of writing SQL queries (as well as how to insert, delete, and modify in the Evergreen database), he also delivered to us the core set of library SQL reports we needed for our development partner libraries. Since two of these libraries are going live in March, this was very timely, indeed!

Oh, and for good measure, he also helped Melissa Lefebvre, our open source project manager, figure out how to customize each of our libraries' web catalog pages so that their specific library logo/image appears in the upper left hand corner of the web catalog display. Very cool!

Dan has contributed all of his course materials to the Evergreen community. You can find them here, as a link from his blog post about his two days with us.

Be sure to thank Dan for his efforts - dan{at}coffeecode{dot}net. This is a major contribution to Planet Evergreen!

Amy
===================
Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation
terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org

I've been a bit quiet for the last two weeks, ostensibly because I've been on vacation. However, much of the time I was preparing to deliver a two-day introduction to SQL for Evergreen to the good people at Bibliomation. On Wednesday I flew down to Middlebury, CT - Bibliomation central - and on Thursday and Friday of this week, I led nine great people* through the ropes of SQL: from understanding the basics of how SQL databases operate all the way through inner and outer joins and set operations. I also walked though a set of SQL queries I had developed to help Bibliomation with the recurring reports they need to provide to their member libraries.

Other than an episode of grievous illness on Thursday night that led to zero food intake and very little sleep on my part, I think things went well; it was gratifying to see lights go on in people's heads as we worked through hands-on exercises and tackled the same problem with different (but valid) approaches, and (with a few minor adjustments) the canned SQL queries seemed to meet their requirements. The feedback I received was positive, and by the time I left I had the sense that they had significantly increased their confidence in their ability to understand the queries I had written for them and to create their own queries. The major remaining learning curve is understanding how all of the pieces of the Evergreen database schema fit together, and through the two days I had tried to bring together pieces like the user tables, the library tables, the circulation and holds tables, and the record / call number / copy tables to help them find the right tables to bring together to meet their needs.

I am happy to say that Bibliomation agreed to my condition that I be allowed to release the materials for this workshop under a CC-BY-SA license, so others can take these materials, adapt or enhance them, and deliver similar training to other Evergreen libraries (as long as the attribution remains and the materials are offered under the same share-alike license). Many thanks to Bibliomation for this contribution to the community! Without further ado, here are the materials:

• Reference documentation (25-ish pages introducing SQL, ending with the canned SQL queries Bibliomation required): (HTML) (PDF)
• Presentation: (OpenOffice.org Impress) (PDF)

* Including people like Kate Sheehan, Melissa Lefebvre, and Benjamin Shum who I previously only knew from the Evergreen mailing lists and other online presences

Come join your friends in the Evergreen community at next month’s PLA conference in Portland!<o:p></o:p>

We’re planning to meet up at Deschutes Brewery for beer and conversation on Thursday, March 25^th, at 5:30pm.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p></o:p>Here’s some more info on Deschutes:<o:p></o:p>

<o:p></o:p>Deschutes Brewery makes several good beers and has a new restaurant/bar. Just take the tram up to NW Everett St. stop and you're right there. 210 NW 11^th Ave.<o:p></o:p>

http://www.deschutesbrewery.com<o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p>

If you plan to come, please RSVP to me at terlaga{at}biblio{dot}org.<o:p></o:p>

Hope to see you there!<o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>Amy<o:p></o:p>

=======================<o:p></o:p>

Amy Terlaga<o:p></o:p>

Assistant Director, User Services<o:p></o:p>

Bibliomation<o:p></o:p>

Come join your friends in the Evergreen community at next month’s PLA conference in Portland!

 

We’re planning to meet up at Deschutes Brewery for beer and conversation on Thursday, March 25th, at 5:30pm.

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The Evergreen development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Evergreen 1.6.0.2 from http://evergreen-ils.org/downloads (including the Windows staff client).

Evergreen 1.6.0.2 is both a bug-fix and minor feature enhancement release: see http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature_list_1_6_0 for an overview of the changes since 1.6.0.1. This release continues the momentum of increased community contributions of bug reports, fixes, and translations.

We invite you to try this releases, our best yet! And if you happen to find any bugs, please report them to https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen or to the Evergreen Development Discussion list.

From the numbers, many of you have already noticed that Feb. 26 marks the end of earlybird registration.  Register now and save $10, which might come in handy at a pub crawl or dine around!

In the process of fixing the previously mentioned issue, we create an issue in another area.  That is now fixed.

As before, here is a drop-in replacement for OpenILS::Application::Search::Biblio.  We’re still planning the 1.6.0.2 release ASAP, but this addresses the known critical search issue.

As before, please let us know of any issues you encounter via either IRC or the mailing lists.

Well, ain’t that always the way.  In an attempt to fix one thing, we’ve broken another.

In 1.6.0.1 we fixed a bug whereby searches containing a colon, but not one that denotes a search class or modifier (like “keyword:” or “site:”), we being completely ignored.  However, that cause complications for some other searches.  The main place we’ve seen this show up is in the Z39.50 server, where requesting holdings output always causes the construction of an offending search.

This was identified by Dan Scott last night, after reports from users in the field, and I committed a fix to all open branches as of 11:00 AM EST today.  We’ll be cutting a new release, 1.6.0.2, as soon as a translation-related fix is applied but in the mean time you can see the change and download the updated file you need right here.  If you’ve installed Evergreen into the default location, drop this file into /openils/lib/perl5/OpenILS/Application/Search/ and restart the whole shebang.  Your searches will then all be happy.

If you have any questions or experience any issues, please join us in IRC or let us know on the mailing lists.

Think about ongoing support for Evergreen:

Unlike vended/licensed systems--where there were no options for support other than the proprietary vendor--and open source system can theoretically be developed by one vendor, installed by another, and supported by yet another.

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Dan Scott of Laurentian University and Project Conifer has agreed to develop Evergreen-specific postgreSQL course materials for Bibliomation as they prepare to migrate five Connecticut public libraries to the Evergreen system in 2010.

Dan will train Bibliomation staff on how to write postgreSQL queries on Thursday, February 18th and Friday, February 19th.  His training examples were developed based on Bibliomation's specific reporting needs.

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In our update call with ESI last week, ESI and KCLS stumbled upon a shared value and need for developmet of technical documentation.  ESI has had a specific project in mind--around 54 hours of work--for awhile.  KCLS needs this kind of documentation for our upcoming migration.

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Congratulations to Amy Terlaga and Bibliomation for finding 3 co-development partners for an initiative to develop a Kids catalog on Evergreen.  It looks like Sitka, PINES, and KCLS have all hopped aboard.  Luck to us all, and hope we get a good product from it, but regardless, this is a great story and a first example of the potential of co-development partnering via the Evergreen Community.

 

Thought you all might be interested in this thread from the Evergreen discussion list.  I pulled out the end of Dan's message in my reply.  Take a moment to read the whole message, it is about the transaction time of the Evergreen client and how it can be improved.  Might be a good place for this group to focus some energy.  

I really like the idea of using our resources to get some kind of independent benchmarking system in place too.

Your thoughts?

Lori

----  My post to the Evergreen list today:

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We've had questions recently about our development plans for Evergreen OPAC.  We're attaching our project plan for OPAC development and implementation here in this post.  This document shows a high level schedule and milestones for this project.  Can you say "tight timeframe"?

Hats off to the KCLS Web Services Department including Lisa Hill, Melissa Falgout, and Josh Ring, who are orchestrating this complex project. 

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The Evergreen development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of OpenSRF 1.2.2 and Evergreen 1.6.0.1 from the Evergreen downloads page (including the Windows staff client and a minimalist virtual image for testing and development).

Evergreen 1.6.0.1 is both a bug-fix and translation release: see the release notes for an overview of the changes since 1.6.0.0. This release continues the healthy momentum of increased community contributions of bug reports, fixes, and new and improved translations – many thanks to all of you for making Evergreen a better system for all of us!

OpenSRF 1.2.2 (change log) follows just one week after the quietly released OpenSRF 1.2.1 (change log). Both releases focus on bug fixes and enhanced portability; most importantly for OpenSRF, it is now compatible with current versions of ejabberd, process and resource handling has been improved, and the OpenSRF HTTP translator interface delivers better browser compatibility and closer compliance to the OpenSRF-over-HTTP specification.

We invite you to try these releases, our best yet! And if you happen to find any bugs, please report them to the bug tracker for Evergreen and OpenSRF, or to the Evergreen Development Discussion list. We also welcome patches for enhancements or new features and new or updated translations.

Equinox is  expanding our services to include support for Koha, the open source integrated library system initiated by the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand. Our press release can be found here.  We’ll focus on hosting, migration, support, and training at first, but we also offer Koha development services.

We’ll be building on our work supporting Evergreen, the expertise of staff at Equinox who have been active in the Koha development community, and the experience of several business partners to grow our Koha support offerings over time and provide good service to both Koha and Evergreen users. We believe that both Koha and Evergreen are good choices for libraries who want to automate using an open source ILS, and we are committed to being good vendor citizens in the Evergreen and Koha communities. The Equinox Promise is not just for our Evergreen customers — it is for all of our customers, no matter what open source library software we help them use.

On a personal note, I’m really looking forward to the chance to do even more cross-fertilization between the Koha and Evergreen projects. Each project has its own special strengths and development priorities, and there are a lot of good ideas that can be shared between them.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ,

Norcross, GA- February 11, 2010

Equinox Software, Inc, announces new hosting and support services for the Koha open source ILS to libraries. Two different packages will be available for libraries to choose from based on their needs and resources.

Koha on Demand is aimed at libraries looking for quick provisioning of new Koha databases. This service provides a modern, full-featured ILS with system administration managed by Equinox.

Koha Dedicated Hosting provides a virtual private server (VPS) with Koha installed. This service is geared toward libraries looking to outsource the provisioning, hosting, and basic maintenance of a Koha database while still having direct access to customize and develop their Koha installations as they see fit.

According to Galen Charlton, Equinox Vice-President for Data Services, "Equinox Software will, of course, continue to support and develop Evergreen. However, we are taking advantage of in-house Koha expertise to be able to diversify our service offerings. In addition, we plan to build on our expertise in resource sharing in the context of a single ILS and extend it to encompass sharing among multiple ILSs."

There has been debate in the Koha community about certain issues regarding development and community assets. One of Equinox's advantages for Koha customers is the Equinox Promise (http://blog.esilibrary.com/2009/09/16/the-equinox-promise/). Full access to the source code will always be available to our hosted customers, to use, modify, or redistribute under the terms of the GPL. Furthermore, source code will be available in a form that makes it convenient for a customer to manage and submit contributions to the Koha project.

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, says "Equinox supports a global, unified Koha project whose assets, including global trademarks and project-websites, are held on behalf of Koha users and developers everywhere by a vendor-neutral Koha foundation or similar non-profit entity."

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.org or 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 bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community.

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

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Koha and Evergreen are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

It's official - Bibliomation will be partnering with King County Library System (Washington state), the SITKA Libraries (British Columbia), and the PINES library network (Georgia Public Library Service) to develop the specifications for the very first Evergreen kids' catalog.

We will be collaborating with FGI, the Seattle-based web design firm that is also currently working with King County to develop a new interface for the Evergreen adult catalog.

Our first conference call should take place in the coming weeks. At that time we'll work on defining the business objectives of the project and identifying all areas of the project that need to be completed from a creative and technical standpoint. Then, we'll move on to the development of the project plan itself.

Once we have the project plan in place, we'll be looking for additional development partners. If your library system is interested in participating in this exciting and fun project, please drop me an email at terlagaATbiblioDOTorg.

Thanks!
Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation

It’s time to get involved in the discussion.

Dear Grant Partners:

We thought about holding a call in February, but I couldn’t visualize how to make the conference call format effective, so I’m trying a letter this month.  If any of you have questions or would like a direct update via phone, drop me a line and we’ll set something up.

Going to keep things simple this month.  Its easiest for me if we are always working from a simple common story.  I have two requests of you:

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Our own Amy Terlaga was once an open-source-ILS-phobe. She tells the story of her journey from resistance to enthusiastic embrace in this month's Computers in Libraries magazine.

For our Connecticut readers, the article is available through iCONN.

Fear and trembling in Connecticut: (or 'how I learned to stop worrying and love open source') is a must-read!

-Kate

Hi All,

The rotating images on the home page need your help.  If you've got any photos you'd like to contribute, just send them to me and I'll get them resized and loaded up so they do their part.  Would love to see what images you come up with!  If you've looked closely at what's there, you'll see that there are no rules about what is appropriate (within the law of course) so feel free to get creative!

Lori

 

Attached is a brief history of the development of Open Source computing at the Orange County Library System and our experience bothe with homegrown systems and commercial ILS products.

I'm looking into embedding an IRC chat in place of the current chatroom software (which is way too clunky).  I think this is a good way to get people familiar with IRC (which is handy for developing experience that is relevant for communicating with the open source community...potentially anway).  I also think it might be a cleaner way to create real-time communication opportunities for members.

Any thoughts?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA- February 3, 2010

Kirtland Community College has gone live with Evergreen, the consortial, open-source library automation software. Equinox Software, Inc., the support and development company established by the original Evergreen developers, provided migration assistance for the project and will provide ongoing technical support. The server for the new installation is being hosted at the college and members of the Michigan Library Consortium provided staff training.

Known as the "College in the Woods," Kirtland Community College is located in Roscommon, Michigan about 170 miles north of Detroit. They also have two satellite locations in Gaylord and West Branch. The library currently holds about 32,500 bibliographic items and has 760 patrons. To learn more about Kirtland Community College, please visit their website at: http://www.kirtland.cc.mi.us/

Deb Shumaker, Director of Library Services for Kirtland Community College, says "The Kirtland Community College Library is extremely pleased with the move to Evergreen. The product, support, and Evergreen Community embrace the library's philosophy of providing our patrons with the best possible resources and services available."

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, said "Kirtland Community College is currently undergoing an upgrade of their library facilities. We are pleased that Evergreen and Equinox could play a role in that upgrade and help improve library usage for the students, faculty, and community residents."

About Evergreen

Evergreen is a robust, highly scalable, open-source integrated library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites. Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community.

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

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

One of the major goals of the IMLS grant is the creation of resources that allow us to collaborate on new development. 

The purpose of RSCEL is as much about creating a thriving development community as it is creating a collaborative user community.  The one won't really go anywhere without the other.

So we have an RFP hitting the street in the next couple of weeks, on behalf of the grant, to develop a shared enhancement database where we can

• Enter new software and enhancement ideas
• Review them as a community
• Endorse or modify
• Prioritize
• Offer to contribute toward cost-sharing
• Convert the ideas into a specification format that a developer can easily work from
• Publish requests to the development community
• Track request progress

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I met my new neighbor last week.  An open welcome here to Rob Zangara who has recently come aboard as the chief technology officer for the Seattle Public Library.  Rob Comes to the West Coast from the New Jersey State library and he brings alot of experience in networking and technology infrastructure.  A friend across Lake Washington with this kind of experience is welcome news to me as I could use some good advice and collaboration toward development of a longer-term vision for the network at KCLS.

While Rob was interested in Evergreen and open-source, it wasn't necessarily at the top of his list.  Like all of us, he faces a lava field of immediate technology priorities.  High on Rob's queue was the need for attention to functional problems with the PC Reservation system.

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Given the the awards that Project Conifer will be presented with at the OLA SuperConference, this might be a good opportunity to mention the Customizing and Extending Evergreen: a guide for geeks workshop that I'll be giving on Wednesday, February 24th. The workshop description promises:

Together, we will break OpenSRF down into its constituent parts (JSON, XMPP) and put it back together again in Perl, Python, and JavaScript so that you can define new services, or integrate existing services into other applications and websites. You will learn how PostgreSQL underpins Evergreen's search indices and how to access and modify any data in the system with permission-based storage APIs; plus we will build new interfaces with the Dojo JavaScript framework Evergreen extensions.

That's a hefty agenda for a half-day workshop, but I promise to do my best to deliver on that promise...

The Ontario Library Association (OLA) announced its 2010 OLA and OLA Divisional Award winners today, and to my great surprise Project Conifer was named the winner of two awards:

1. The Ontario College and University Library Association (OCULA) Special Achievement Award
2. The Ontario Library Information Technology Association (OLITA) Award for Technical Innovation

All of the libraries in the Project Conifer consortium have been listed in the award announcement, and for good reason: everyone using the Evergreen library system since May 2009 has contributed to the project, be it by bug reports, or suggestions for enhancement, or sharing approaches to solving problems, or contributing code. This has been a real team effort, and make no mistake: the road has been bumpy at times, and there's a lot of road left to travel before we get to our destination. Dan furtively glances at the open list of requested enhancements on the Conifer ticket system and gets back to finishing off this blog post... The continuing support of staff and librarians across the consortium has been critical to keeping things moving in a very positive direction, and I'm delighted that they're being recognized for their efforts.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA - January 28, 2010

Washington County Public Library has selected Evergreen as their next-generation Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox Software, "The Evergreen Experts," will provide data migration, software configuration, and post-migration technical support. When Washington County Public Library goes live in the spring, it will be the first known library in Kentucky running Evergreen.

The Washington County Public Library, located in Springfield, Kentucky, was built in 1966. With a collection that contains 30,000 bibliographic items the library serves a community of just under 12,000 citizens from both their main branch and a bookmobile. To learn more about Washington County Library, please visit their website at: http://www.washingtonkylibrary.org/.

According to Washington County Public Library Director Joy Wandrey, "the best thing about moving to Evergreen for our community is that this is a reliable system which will enable us to be certain about where a book is, and whether it's checked in or out. We will also be able to more accurately tell you if we have a particular book. We are looking forward to more accurate records and more up to date patron accounts. This will make it easier to use the library, and to receive correct receipts."

Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, says "Washington County Public Library is an excellent example of how a library does not have to be part of a consortium to benefit from what Evergreen has to offer."

About Evergreen

Evergreen is robust, highly scalable, open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites. Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 500 hundred of libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 4 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces. For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community. For more information on Equinox Software, please visit: http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

Anyone familiar with my previous writing and thinking about RFID may find this post ironic, if not contradictory.  I'm hoping rather that it simply reflects keeping an open mind about the evolution of technology, and the value and energy that can be created by public libraries working together to create great new services through newfound control of their information systems.

In summary, this post is an open-letter of support for a grant proposal led by the Grand Rapids Public Library.  The proposal is for the development of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sub-system and standard for interoperability with the Evergreen system.

The potential benefits for public libraries include better patron service and staff efficiency for material handling, self-checkout, and possibly a few security options to try to discourage disappearance of popular media materials.

Cutting right to the chase, the possible benefit that I'm really jazzed about for KCLS is the ability of this concept to make it so that our backroom staff don't have to open every single DVD or CD that returns to the library to verify that:

a) the disk is actually in the container and

b) that multiple disk sets actually have all the disks included

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As regular readers know, we've been looking for ideas for a kid's catalog. We posted our original list a few weeks ago and since then, we've held a chat session with our members to brainstorm more ideas, including:

• A title suggestion feature (in addition to spell-check)
• Editable buttons that lead to searches or lists
• Robust sorting
• Moderated reviews that use screen names
• An area for customizable text to promote upcoming events
• Book suggestions/ Reading lists
• Feed of Kid's Events

We're working with other consortia to develop a kid's catalog that includes all of the features we need (i.e. the features we currently have in Horizon) and as many of the features we want as possible. Keep the ideas coming!

-Kate

 

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2010 LITA National Forum Call for Proposals

Due Date for proposals: February 19, 2010

The 2010 National Forum Committee seeks proposals for high quality concurrent sessions, preconferences and poster sessions for the 13th annual LITA National Forum to be held in Atlanta GA, September 30 - October 3, 2010.

Theme: The Cloud and the Crowd

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In "Makers", Kodak and Duracell are merging to form the conglomerate, "Kodacell".  The new company has wads of cash, but no products that anyone wants to buy anymore.  Sound familiar?

So an Eminent blogger, Suzanne Church, is hired by the CEO of Kodacell to move from Silicon Valley to the burned-out, bankrupted suburban strip-mall  wastelands of Florida and write about the new engineering exploits of two guys who specialize in scavenging the circuitry from piles of unsold Boogie-Woogie Elmo dolls and constructing innovative but useless technological inventions that sell well for a time, and have not yet been copied and undercut by overseas sweatshops.

To the CEO, Kodacell's future is innovation.  Recognizing that every product they create will have it's margins fully undercut by global competition within 6 months, the strategy for the company is innovation for innovation's sake.  Don't stick with an idea too long.  Come up with a new one before the old one is completely subsumed by more efficient world-wide copycat operations.

This theme should strike a warm chord in the restless heart of the library open source community.

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The Evergreen Documentation Interest Group (DIG) has voted to accept the following proposals for Evergreen Documentation Licensing. The vote took place December 21, 2009 – January 4, 2010 on the Documentation Interest Group Mailing List. There were 18 yes votes and 0 no votes, for a unanimous decision.

Since these licensing terms affect the entire Evergreen community, and particularly anyone who has contributed to the Documentation Wiki, we wanted to keep everyone informed. Please take a moment to read the licensing terms below (also available on the wiki at http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-docs:documentation_licensing_terms). If you have previously contributed documentation to the Documentation Wiki and do NOT want your contributions to be licensed under these terms, please contact the DIG facilitators or the DIG mailing list and let us know that by Friday, January 29th.

I am crossposting this to several Evergreen related mailing lists and blogs, as well as sending an email about this to anyone with a DokuWiki account, so I apologize for duplicate messages. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the DIG facilitators at docs@evergreen-ils.org.

I hope you’ll agree that this is a positive step forward for the Evergreen community. And, if you find some free time, that you might consider joining the Documentation Interest Group in producing some community-wide documentation.

Thanks,
Karen Collier
Documentation Interest Group Co-Facilitator

1 – Official Evergreen Documentation produced by the Documentation Interest Group should be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

2 – Any code included in the official documentation produced by the Documentation Interest Group should also be made available under the GNU GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

3 – Official Evergreen Documentation may be made available under another copy-left (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/copyleft.html) open source (http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd) license in the future with a majority vote on the Evergreen Documentation List (open-ils-documentation@list.georgialibraries.org) or comparable indication of the Evergreen community’s wishes.

4 – These same licensing terms should be applied to the Documentation Wiki. Past contributors to the Documentation Wiki should be notified by emails sent to Evergreen community mailing lists and to the email address associated with their docuwiki account of the new licensing terms and given a reasonable amount of time to request that their contributions not be included under those licensing terms.

5 – By submitting documentation to the Documentation wiki or to the Evergreen Documentation List after licensing terms have been decided and publicized, contributors indicate that they (a) agree to these licensing terms, and (b) to the best of their knowledge have the right to do so through copyright ownership, permission from the copyright owner(s), and/or the licensing terms of any documents that were modified or incorporated into their submission.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA -January 12, 2010

SCLENDS, the South Carolina library resource sharing network, welcomes the final three members in their group of pilot libraries. Anderson County, Fairfield, and Florence public library systems have gone live with Evergreen, the consortial, open-source library automation software. Equinox Software, Inc., the development and support company established by the original Evergreen developers, provided support for the migrations and will now provide hosting services for the consortium as well as 24/7 technical support.

With the initial pilot of phase of SCLENDS now complete, the program will be open for other South Carolina libraries to migrate in 2010. The web address for SCLENDS' growing catalog is http://sclends.lib.sc.us .

Brad LaJeunesse, Equinox President, says "It has been very exciting to watch the SCLENDS consortium take shape. Resource sharing will bring huge benefits to South Carolina library patrons and we are glad Equinox could be a part of that."

About Evergreen

Evergreen is robust, highly scalable, open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites. Since its debut in September 2006 as the software sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium, Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports hundreds of libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 4 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community.

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

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA -January 11, 2010

Equinox Software, Inc., the support and development company for Evergreen open-source library software welcomes Rob Herrmann and Sally Fortin to our staff. Herrmann will serve as Sales Executive and Fortin will be our Educational Services Manager.

Herrmann is a library veteran having previously worked for SirsiDynix in several areas from support and deployment, to sales. At MnLink, a Minnesota statewide consortium, he was a Systems Analyst. Herrmann is a 1999 graduate of the University of South Carolina's College of Library and Information Science. As Sales Executive, he will play a key role in the development of new business relationships for Equinox.

Herrmann says "With libraries facing greater challenges, asked to do more with less, I am excited to join the community developing an open source solution for libraries. I am thankful to join the Equinox team and help contribute to the success of the Evergreen ILS."

As Educational Services Manager, Fortin will develop education procedures and provide training for both new and future Evergreen users. Her professional life has been spent teaching in educational contexts. She taught English composition and literature at the collegiate level for three years before pursuing a degree in library science. She was graduated from Florida State's School of Library and Information Studies in 2008. Since then, Fortin has worked in public and academic libraries, with responsibilities in circulation, cataloging, and reference. Most recently, she was the reference librarian at Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta, where she developed library instruction for students, faculty, and staff.

According to Fortin, "I am excited to combine my enthusiasm for teaching and libraries in the position of Educational Services Manager at Equinox Software. I am eager to begin working with the community of Evergreen users!"

About Evergreen

Evergreen is robust, highly scalable, open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites. Since its debut in September 2006 as the software sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium, Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports hundreds of libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen's rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 4 countries including 10 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community.

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

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113

Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

Well--its time again for the major holiday that immediately follows New Years Day:  The first day of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.  This year Steve Ballmer has center stage showing a new slate computer from Microsoft that appears to be making it to market just ahead of a similar slate computer that we all know is coming from Apple.  Note what Ballmer says about the new device--among other things:  "Its perfect for Reading..."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2010725499_ces07.html?pr...

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The Second Annual Evergreen Conference will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan from April 21-23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel.

At ALA Midwinter next week, we plan to meet with some of the library directors of SC LENDS (South Carolina) and the three networks in Massachusetts (NOBLE, MVLC, and C/W MARS) with plans to move to Evergreen. It will be sometime on Saturday - either the morning or late afternoon (3:30ish). (We're still coordinating schedules at the moment.) There's a room at the convention center that ALA has set aside for these kinds of informal meetings. It's called the Networking Uncommons and it's located in Lobby B of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, near the entrance to the Exhibit Hall and ALA Store.

This will be our first chance to chat with the South Carolina folks and I'm looking forward to meeting them, to see how their Evergreen system is coming along, what kinds of enhancements they still need, and where we might be able to share in some of the development effort.

If you're interested in participating in or just sitting in on the conversation, drop me an email - terlagaATbiblioDOTorg.

==================
Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services

Good news!  Our Michigan Evergreen presentation proposal was accepted for the 2010 Library Technology Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 2010.

The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 2, Issue 10 – November/December, 2009

As a reminder, we post this newsletter to the Evergreen general discussion list, development list, and the Evergreen blog. Cross-posting and forwarding are encouraged.

In This Issue

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Development and Documentation Update, A Booking Module for Mohawk, Evergreen People, Evergreen Jobs, Lyrasis Evergreen Classes, New Evergreen Libraries, Planet Evergreen, A Few Reminders, Newsletter Administrivia

Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

• Please come by and visit the Equinox team and learn more about Evergreen during ALA MidWinter, January 15-18, 2010, booth # 2064
• The 2010 Evergreen International Conference will be held April 21-23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids Michigan. The Conference website contains general information, schedule, exhibitor information, sponsorship information, a link to the Grand Rapids Convention and Visitors Bureau, a link to the Amway for online reservations, and a link to the registration site. Please join us for an exciting 3 days of learning, sharing, networking, and fun in Grand Rapids! http://www.evergreen2010.org/

Do you know of Evergreen events you’d like to share here? Please contact us at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Evergreen Development and Documentation Update

• Evergreen 1.6.0.0 released!
  • Evergreen 1.6.0.0 was released in mid-November and is already in production at a number of sites. There are many new features, including Google Book Preview, easier OPAC customization with BibTemplate, located URIs, improvements to the Z39.50/SRU server, and a preview of Acquisitions. You can find Evergreen 1.6.0.0 on the downloads page, along with the newly-released OpenSRF 1.2.0 and a staff client build for Windows.
• Evergreen 1.4.0.7 released!
  • A new minor version of the 1.4.x series was also released. This includes a number of bugfixes and is available on the downloads page.
• New BuildBot
  • Shawn Boyette released a preview of a BuildBot to automate testing of Evergreen and OpenSRF. See http://testing.esilibrary.com/ for a preview (Warning: Firefox 3.5+, Chrome, or Safari required to view site at the moment).
• Evergreen Developer Workshop Now Online
  • Dan Scott held an Evergreen Developer Workshop at FSOSS 2009 in Toronto, Canada. Robert Soulliere from Mohawk College has uploaded videos of the workshop to Archive.org, splitting the talk into 9 segments. Dan has also put his workshop materials online. There’s an HTML version with written details and, for the extra keen, there’s a also a tarball that contains the HTML version plus the code used in the examples and Dan’s slides. If you’re a new developer that wants to obtain more in-depth knowledge of Evergreen, this is a great place to start.

A Booking Module for Mohawk

Ever since Mike Rylander presented at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference way back in 2006? 05? Mohawk has been eyeing Evergreen. We finally went live with Evergreen in July 2009. BTW, the 2010 Super Conference is full of Evergreen goodness: Dan Scott is leading a pre-conference workshop for would be EG developers, and Robert Soulliere and Cynthia Williamson will be presenting on the Mohawk experience.

Prior to going live, Mohawk belonged to an ILS consortium using SIRSI’s Unicorn and felt constrained, to say the least. This article is not about that experience but suffice it to say that after a long haul of sorting out using a Linux server when no one else in the college does and figuring out if we could do without the acquisitions and serials modules, we aimed to go live in late spring or early summer of 2009.

Our big stumbling block was the inability to book video materials in Evergreen. The Library @ Mohawk purchases and circulates all of the audiovisual materials used by faculty to teach. In Unicorn, it was possible for staff to book a video or DVD for a specific day and time so that instructors could use them in class. The booking restricted circulation on the booked video or DVD so that it would be available at the right time, even if it had to be sent to another campus. EG did not have this feature. We thought about using a separate calendar system and some modified circ rules but in the end it seemed best to get things working in EG. We figured out early on that Robert, our Systems Librarian would not be able to develop the booking module himself. The next step was squeezing into the Equinox development schedule – they are a busy bunch!

The joy of FOSS is that we were able to go live early in the final year of our support contract with SIRSI and thus run both systems, something usually impossible during a migration because it is almost financially impossible to pay for a new system while continuing to pay for an old system. So we used EG for most things but continued to book videos and DVDs in Unicorn.We managed to get in to the Equinox development line-up with the promise that the module will be ready for the end of 2009, a good 3 months before we turn off Unicorn.

Originally, we envisioned the feature to work like an enhanced hold because our current needs are strictly for bibliographic material bookings. However, in our initial discussions with Equinox, it was clear that we could create a more useful module if it is possible to book non-bibliographic items like rooms, equipment, etc. Done! It is our hope that this module appeals to lots of folks and will make EG even more “saleable”. Between it and serials and acquisitions, EG is becoming quite the grown-up ILS.

We’re only part way through the development so we won’t share details here now. We’re just about ready to test it, the module will be shared with everyone and made available in 1.6. If you want to learn more about what Mohawk is doing with EG please come to Toronto for the OLA Super Conference and if you can’t, we’ll be sharing our presentation. Access our EG implementation here: http://libcat.mohawkcollege.ca

Cynthia Williamson,
Collection Management Librarian,
Mohawk College, Hamilton ON

Evergreen People

Amy Terlaga, of Bibliomation, Inc., in Middlebury, CT, will have her article, “Fear and Trembling in Connecticut (or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Open Source’)”, published in the January/February 2010 issue of Computers in Libraries. She details her consortium’s decision to migrate their libraries to Evergreen, after an initial period of personal open source angst. Amy can be reached at terlaga@biblio.org.

Evergreen Jobs

• Equinox Software has openings for Software Developers and a Chief Operating Officer. Please visit http://esilibrary.com/esi/careers.php for more information.

Do you know of Evergreen related jobs that you’d like to share here? Let us know at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Lyrasis Evergreen Classes

Lyrasis is offering several Evergreen classes in the near future:

Evergreen Circulation Module (Live Online)
2/4/2010, 10:00am-12:00pm EST

Evergreen Cataloging Module (Live Online)
3/3/2010-3/4/2010 2:00pm-4:00pm EST

Evergreen Administration and Reports Module (Live Online)
3/10/2010, 10:00am-12:00pm EST

To register, please see the Lyrasis website.

LYRASIS (created from a merger of SOLINET, PALINET and NELINET) has taught dozens of Evergreen classes. Lyrasis is dedicated to training and instructing Evergreen, and they welcome your comments and suggestions for courses. All of their current course offerings are continuously updated, and Lyrasis plans to add more courses in the future. For comments or questions, contact Lyrasis instructors Jennifer.Bielewski@lyrasis.org or Jenny.Liberatore@lyrasis.org

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

• Evergreen Indiana
  • Since the previous newsletter, six more library systems in Indiana migrated to Evergreen: Culver-Union Public Township Library, LaGrange Public Library, Monticello-Union Township Public Library, Paoli Public Library, Princeton-Patoka Township Library, Syracuse Turkey Creek Township Public Library, Vermillion County Public Library, Waveland Brown Township Public Library, West Lafayette Public Library, Westfield Washington Public Library, and Wolcott Community Public Library. These migrations bring the number of Indiana libraries online with Evergreen up to 53! For more information, see the press release.
• BC SITKA
  • The Thompson-Nicola Regional District Library System became Sitka’s 25th site. With 13 branches and 1 bookmobile, TNRD is the largest system on Sitka’s instance of Evergreen so far.
• Hekman Library at Calvin College migrated to Evergreen in December, 2009.

Planet Evergreen

Can’t get enough news about Evergreen open source software? Subscribe to or read Planet Evergreen, an aggregator for Evergreen-related posts. Have a blog that talks about Evergreen? To add your blog to the Planet Evergreen blog aggregator, send email to Dan Scott at dan@coffeecode.net

A Few Reminders

Evergreen has a Flickr set and a Facebook group.

Newsletter Administrivia

Feel free to forward, share, etc.! The co-wranglers for this newsletter (produced every month–sometimes earlier, sometimes later–what can we say!) are …

Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation, Inc., terlaga@biblio.org
Jason Etheridge, Equinox Software Inc., jason@esilibrary.com

You can also reach us both at newsletter@evergreen-ils.org

Licensing

For an Internet-distributed newsletter such as this, there’s arguably an implied license for what you can do with and how you can distribute the newsletter. Going forward, we’d like to produce this newsletter under an explicit license, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which is an open “copy-left” license similar to that used by Evergreen. If you contribute content that is copyrighted or copyrightable, please let us know if you do not agree to have it released under this license. Thanks!