And two more things from Dan Scott of Conifer (though we didn’t know about this before we went to press with the newsletter): he’s giving a keynote at NELINET’s conference on October 9th with the title “Developing a crush on Evergreen” about Conifer and the state of Evergreen, and will also be giving a talk about Evergreen at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2009.
Archive for the ‘People’ Category
Dan Scott, speaker extraordinaire
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Evergreen International Conference 2009: Standing Together
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009A holiday weekend immediately followed “eg09,” as we tagged it, so it will be next week most likely before we see all the slides, pictures, blog posts, and whatnot associated with Evergreen International Conference 2009.
In some ways the Evergreen conference felt like a joyous family gathering, the kind where you connect with relatives you have only heard about through family folklore. For the first time ever, that which is “Evergreen” was in one place at one time, sharing common goals and interests. This will happen again many more times, but it will never happen again for the very first time.
It was a terrific event by all accounts, with a remarkable level of energy and excitement that began building in Wednesday’s “anyfests” for coding, sysadmin training, and documentation planning, then moved smoothly into a terrific opening-night reception.
On Thursday, Lamar Veatch, state librarian for Georgia, set the tone for the conference by beginning his opening remarks with the international recording of Stand By Me. (Sounds as if Evergreen now has a theme song?) Joe Lucia then gave an amazing opening keynote address, “Song of the Open Road.” We then all moved into a day and a half of bogglingly wonderful programs, table talks, Birds of a Feather sessions, keynotes, dine-arounds, pub crawls, and more.
On Friday we closed out our conference with a development update, three lightning talks, the last programs, and Jessamyn West’s closing keynote. Then we adjourned.. and it was all over, for the very first time!
William Jessup University: a self-implemented Evergreen site
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009William Jessup University, in California’s Sierra Foothills, is one of a number of sites that install and maintain their own Evergreen implementations. They went live in January 2009, at the beginning of their spring semester.
It’s often said that you don’t have to go it alone with Evergreen — there are commercial support options — but another way to express this is that you CAN go it alone with Evergreen. The software is free to download, free to use, free to modify — and your data also remains free, rather than sequestered in some vendor’s system or “cloud.”
Kevin Pischke, Jessup’s library director, added some thoughts about Evergreen. “We were in need of a new ILS from the standpoint that our old ILS no longer met our needs as a growing academic library. We looked into various proprietary and open source options for a replacement. Ultimately, we choose Evergreen because it is a well-supported open source project with a growing focus on the needs of academic libraries.”
Going it alone with open source software requires good resources — and of course, good software. Library director Kevin Pischke said, “we could never have done it without our IT staff [particularly Jeff Green] and of course the quality of the Evergreen project. W
e are a small library with a solid IT staff to rely on for support; however, as a library director I had the peace of mind that I could always contract with Equinox if we need further professional support.”
Kevin shared some last thoughts about what they hope to get out of Evergreen International Conference. “I am hoping to connect with and learn from others using Evergreen,” said Jeff. “We have been doing so much on our own that to spend time with others in the same boat should be refreshing and exciting.”
(Editorial note: the Evergreen community needs a better name for these implementations than “self-implemented site!” Ideas?)
George Duimovich on the Evergreen conference and other topics
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
We recently spoke to George Duimovich about what he hopes to get out of the Evergreen International Conference (May 20-22, Athens, Georgia) and about his thoughts about open source in general. (Note: George is at Natural Resources Canada, which recently signed a contract with Equinox Software for Evergreen development, but his comments are his own, not NRCan’s.)
(Also see the Evergreen conference wiki for programs, keynotes, and other conference events.)
About the conference, George said,”This conference will be a major milestone for the Evergreen community and one for the history books I’m sure!” He added, “I think the conference is going to be an essential opportunity to talk about the present and future status of the Evergreen project, but also to further establish personal contacts and awareness of the user and developer communities. ”
About Evergreen’s advantages: “What many libraries want is to hit that ’sweet spot’ between the classic turn-key solution as well as having unrestricted developer-oriented possibilities when required. We view Evergreen as being the best-positioned to offer the better of both worlds, and ultimately, we anticipate that our staff and patrons will be best served by a system that we can better control, influence and support.”
About he benefits of participating in an open source community: “[This] has helped us to reach out to other libraries doing interesting and dynamic work. Our interest in collaborative technology at NRCan is more about supporting people working together than it is about the technology, and the open source model is one of several effective ways to achieve this. We also like the fact that Evergreen has an established and growing presence among Canadian academic and public libraries. For example, we were able to work with Laurentian University on contributing to the French language edition of Evergreen, and the results are now shared at no cost with the global Evergreen community.”
George added, “It’s also been incredibly refreshing to work with an ILS that from the get-go allows us to work with independent, local IT suppliers, allowing for a broader and more competitive network of service providers to rely on.”
Evergreen’s future: “One of the positives about moving to Evergreen is that you don’t have to be worried as much about the future of your ILS. Realistically, there are going to be concerns no matter what ILS you chose, but consider a practical example. One of the hottest and mosting interesting trends in library systems is the decoupling of your online catalog from your ILS. Evergreen comes with a built-in indexing engine that is very good and getting better all the time; nevertheless, your library may have local requirements to explore other open source or proprietary discovery alternatives (e.g. vuFind, Blacklight, Endeca, BiblioCommons, etc.). Since many ILSs offer only restricted access or have weak API ‘hooks’ into your data, many libraries face the prospect of having to “gamble” up front on a bet with a single vendor to do it all. And if their vendor’s search engine strategy falters, you’re left with limited, often costly options to improve upon the situation.
“Since we want to keep as many doors open as possible, we’re able to sit more comfortably with the knowledge that our data is stored in a vendor-neutral repository – and already, we see the marketplace is advancing with connector drivers for both open source and proprietary search solutions that can work with Evergreen (e.g. vuFind & Endeca). This also meant that we didn’t have to determine in advance the ‘ultimate’ discovery solution for our users right now, when we’re more focussed on short term challenges such as completing our first migration.”
“In the short to medium term, we’re hoping to see some key gaps filled (serials control for example), and longer term, we’d like to see how the community exploits the powerful, underlying general platform upon which Evergreen is built (for example, as a possible platform for non-MARC-compliant datasources, etc.).”
Joe Lucia and Jessamyn West to keynote at Evergreen Conference
Thursday, February 5th, 2009We are delighted to announce that Jessamyn West and Joe Lucia will be keynote speakers at the first-ever Evergreen International Conference, May 20-22 at the Classic Center in Athens, Georgia!
(See the conference website for developing information — early-bird registration opens February 18, and we’re signing hotel contracts as we speak. Start thinking about programs you could present at the conference!)
Jessamyn West is a librarian living in rural Vermont solving technology problems for schools and libraries. She has been speaking on the intersection of libraries, technology and politics since 2003 and has given presentations in twenty-six U.S. states, three Australian states and three Canadian provinces.
Jessamyn also gained YouTube fame with her video documenting installing Ubuntu on a public library computer. Jessamyn could be said to be a big fan of “open” — open source, open access, open libraries. She has written and published widely, and also maintains the highly popular, long-lived and immensely readable blog, librarian.net.
Joe Lucia is the University Librarian and director of Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University. His advocacy for open source led his library to develop Vufind, an open-source discovery layer for library catalogs. Villanova University recently received a prestigious $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for the Project VuFind software.
Joe was also recently elected president of PALINET, one of the largest and oldest regional U.S. library networks, serving 600 institutional members in the mid-Atlantic region.
These are just TWO of the many wonderful reasons to attend the first-ever Evergreen International Conference this May. See you there!