I’ve been contributing to Evergreen in various ways for a long time now, and strongly hinted back in October that this was becoming more than just a personal involvement with Evergreen.
Laurentian University, my employer, recently issued a press release announcing that we have selected Evergreen as our future library system. I think this is big news, because Evergreen has thus far been seen primarily as a public library system. We recognize that there are some major tasks to accomplish before we can migrate to Evergreen — acquisitions, serials, academic reserves, documentation — but we’ve observed and participated in the Evergreen development effort, were encouraged by the results, and therefore have chosen to contribute resources to the development effort to help evolve Evergreen towards what we need from an academic library system.
We believe that Evergreen represents the best possible path towards a library system that will meet our users’ current and future needs. Evergreen does not repeat the mistakes of integrated library systems of the past: its service oriented architecture and Perl, C, Java, and Python bindings make it an integrated, yet loosely coupled, library system that can also integrate with our existing campus applications.
The University of Windsor took the important first step of establishing a community for academic institutions by partnering with GPLS to work on the acquisitions module. By selecting Evergreen as our future library system and contributing to the development effort, Laurentian University is taking the next step in solidifying that community — and based on the interest that has already been expressed by other academic institutions (both directly to us, and publicly on the Evergreen mailing lists), we look forward to other institutions joining us in building a strong, collaborative, and innovative community.
