Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

Evergreen 2009 Conference

Evergreen Newsletter, May 2009

The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 2, Issue 5 — May, 2009

Cross-posting and forwarding is encouraged.

In Just Two Days, Trees Dance in the Forest

Or at least, the first-ever Evergreen International Conference will commence in Athens, Georgia (May 20-22, 2009). More below!

In This Issue…

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Conference Preview, Lyrasis Evergreen Classes, PINES Survey Results, Planet Evergreen, New Evergreen Libraries, Newsletter Administrivia

Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

There now really is such a thing as an Evergreen Calendar! Its website: http://evergreen-ils.org/calendar

If you have Evergreen-related events to add (talks, conferences, etc.), just email events@evergreen-ils.org.

Evergreen International Conference (Athens, Georgia, May 20 – 22, 2009). Our first conference! Joe Lucia and Jessamyn West will be keynoting! See more about this exciting event below.

American Library Association Annual Conference (Chicago, Illinois, July 9-15). We’ll be exhibiting, meeting with people, and so forth!

WilsWorld (Madison, Wisconsin, July 28-29). Karen Schneider to do a plenary session and a couple other spots. Karen spoke at one of the earliest WilsWorld conferences and is excited to return!

Past Conferences: A big thank you to Sharon Herbert and all the other folks at the British Columbia Library Association conference. Karen Schneider of Equinox gave a talk about open source and creativity that was well-attended. The informal chats with Evergreeners and fellow travelers were wonderful too. Also a shout-out to Indiana where Karen did a development update at their regional Evergreen conference.

PINES Users Heart Evergreen

Georgia PINES, the first statewide consortium powered by Evergreen open source library software, has achieved the highest-ever user satisfaction ratings in the five-year history of its annual survey. Based on the 2009 survey, 19 out of 20 respondents (95.6 percent) would recommend the Evergreen-powered PINES system to friends.

(Source: Equinox press release)

Evergreen International Conference, May 20-22, 2009

Questions? Email events@evergreen-ils.org. Also see the registration website and the wiki.

We’re almost there! This conference (social tag eg09) will bring together close to 150 Evergreen users, Evergreen advocates, people evaluating Evergreen or in the market for a new ILS, open source advocates, etc.!

In addition to the conference registration website, also see the growing conference wiki where you can sign up for rides, dine-arounds, table talks, and more (there will also be paper signup forms at the conference).

By now, if you’re attending, you know many of the specifics of the conference — the programs, keynotes, Birds of a Feather, table talks, dine-arounds, lightning talks, and so forth. Here is some information gleaned from our pre-conference survey and other sources:

1. At least half of all attendees report that they will be blogging, tweeting, Flickring, emailing, or otherwise reporting on the conference.

2. Six of the sessions, plus the lightning talks and keynotes, will be videotaped, and these tapes will be later uploaded to the web.

3. At least ten attendees are vegetarians, about a dozen are international, and 8 had questions for the keynote speakers.

4. The top question for the committee was “how do we get from the Atlanta airport to Athens?” (The answer, on the wiki, is to take a shuttle or share a ride. The wiki also has a ride board.)

5. Hackfest turnout has been outstanding. Over 30 people are signed up for Sysadmin Survival Skills. Close to 20 people will gather to discuss documentation. A dozen people have signed up for half-hour Meet with a Developer sessions. And there are a good dozen folks who want to just get together and code!

7. In keeping with an early goal to keep the conference “Ever-GREEN,” there will be SWAG bags (donated by Equinox) which you can proudly use later on for your groceries, while the (very slick-looking) SWAG mugs, donated by Nelinet, will help us all reduce waste.

7. Speaking of sponsors, let this be the first but hardly the last time we thank our conference sponsors! Gold sponsors: Ebsco/Novelist, Unique Management, Equinox Software, and STAT. Silver sponsors: BWI, ITG, 3M, Envisionware, Brodart, Lyrasis, Nelinet, and Georgia Public Library Service. Thank you!

The 2009 Evergreen Conference is jointly coordinated by Georgia Public Library Service, Equinox Software, and Lyrasis. Also, special thanks to Karen Collier at Kent County Library, Maryland, for participating in the program review process.

Lyrasis Rolls Out More Evergreen Training Classes

Evergreen classes are being offered online by Lyrasis (nee Solinet) on the following dates and times:

May 27th Evergreen Guided Tour and Demo (Free).

June 4th Evergreen Admin and Stats Module. Two hour course, 10:00am-12:00pm

Since October, Lyrasis, formerly known as SOLINET and PALINET, has taught close to 25 Evergreen classes with over 100 students! Lyrasis is dedicated to training and instructing Evergreen and welcomes your comments and suggestions for courses. All of our current course offerings are continuously updated and we plan on adding more courses to our catalog on future topics. Feel free to contact Lyrasis Instructors at Jennifer.bielewski@lyrasis.org or Jenny.Liberatore@lyrasis.org for comments or questions about Evergreen courses. We will be at the Evergreen Conference in Athens, GA and are excited to meet those of you attending!

Planet Evergreen

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

Evergreen on Facebook

Evergreen has a growing Facebook group that features events and news related to Evergreen.  The group now has over 280 members. If you’re on Facebook, join our group. If you aren’t on Facebook and you don’t think you’re the Facebook “type,” give it a try. You might be surprised by who’s on Facebook!

A Few Reminders

Webinars and videos: Don’t forget the section on the Evergreen wiki devoted to community-contributed documentation and tutorials.

Evergreen also has a Flickr set.

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

Also see the growing list of Evergreen libraries.

Evergreen Indiana:

Greenwood Public Library

Michigan Evergreen:

Laingsburg Public Library

If you’d like to follow along as libraries join the Evergreen community, you can subscribe to the Equinox press release feed, which will announce most known Evergreen implementations (or follow the Facebook group mentioned above). The Equinox press release feed was recently tweaked to make it easier to track and share the releases.

Newsletter Administrivia

Feel free to forward, share, etc.!

The deadline for the Evergreen newsletter is the last working day before the first of the month… feel free to submit items earlier. The co-wranglers for this newsletter are Karen Schneider, Equinox Community Librarian and John Fink, Digital Technologies Development librarian at McMaster University.

Social Engagement at the Evergreen Conference

Just two weeks from tomorrow, Evergreen users will convene in Athens, Georgia for the first-ever Evergreen International Conference. (Gulp… two weeks?!) As of last Thursday, we had 133 registrants, not including exhibitors!

The conference committee conducted a survey to measure interest in various programs and activities. The results are fascinating…

* Nearly half of all attendees (or about 90% of the survey respondents) plan to report out the conference through social engagement channels such as Twitter, blogs, mailing lists, and Flickr. (Six of the programs will be videotaped, as well.) The Classic Center has free wifi, and we’re also working hard to ensure attendees have electrical power at their chairs and tables.

* Birds-of-a-Feather/Table Talk interest was very high, with some proposed topics getting nearly 40 votes. In descending order of interest, here’s the list from the survey (more can be proposed at the conference, of course!):

Migrations
Evergreen in Consortia
Training
Custom Development
Documentation (there is also a half-day discussion on documentation on 5/20)
Starting an Evergreen User Group
Starting an Evergreen Special Interest Group
Starting an Evergreen Foundation
Evergreen in Small Libraries
Internationalization
Telephony
Reports
System Administration

* Documentation is the leading hackfest topic (that may change when registration closes for Sysadmin Survival Training), with other topics being Meet with a Developer, and hands-on coding.

This is going to be one great conference!

George Duimovich on the Evergreen conference and other topics

George Duimovich 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.).”