Evergreen Libraries

A Google Map of Evergreen Consortia

I have completed a map of the consortia currently running Evergreen. Links to it and to the earlier map which is in order by go-live date are at:
http://www.molyneux.com/EGmaps/.

By clicking on the boxes by the consortia on the map, you can see where these libraries are.

As I explain there, I have figured out how to animate the growth of the Evergreen community using these Google Maps. I have hopes that when I revise the earlier map with the appropriate data that this animation will prove interesting.

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William Jessup University: a self-implemented Evergreen site

William 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. We 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

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.).”