2023 Program Descriptions

Development Hackfest

Are you new to Evergreen development or an old hand at it — or just curious to see how the code gets made? Hackfest is your chance to work on making Evergreen even better, to play around in areas of code you may not typically touch, to get advice, and to learn the mechanics of setting up a development environment and contributing code to Evergreen. Attendees should bring their laptops.

Audience: Technical

Documentation Hackfest

The Document Interest Group (DIG) will be be working on adding new or updating existing documentation. No prior training is needed to participate. All welcome!

Audience: General

Assembling the Blocks: Building and Releasing Evergreen (slides)

Hands-on session leading attendees through the process of building OpenSRF and Evergreen for local use and for release. By the end of the session, attendees will know how to:

• Manage customizations for deployment as a custom version of Evergreen
• Build the Evergreen and OpenSRF distribution tarballs
• Learn the process that the release and documentation teams use to handle schema updates, translations, and release notes. Attendees should come with laptops and the ability to access a Linux or Debian VM. A limited number of VMs _might_ be provided by the presenter. Attendees ideally should have experience installing Evergreen from tarballs, but this experience is not mandatory to benefit from the program.

Audience: Technical

So You Want to Convert to Linux 101 (slides)

Do you ever get jealous of your super cool friends who run their computers on Linux operating systems? Do you want to try out Linux but don’t know where to start? In this 101 presentation, we’ll talk about different Linux distributions, open source compatible software for Linux, choosing the right distribution for you, and a quick demonstration on how to install them for FREE to test it out!

Audience: General

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Git

How to use git from beginner to advanced. From getting git through setting it up and using it on a daily basis with Evergreen. Recommended workflows for keeping up to date and managing customizations.

Audience: Technical

Accessibility in Evergreen (slides | handout)

There is no one way to make something perfectly accessible; different categories of disabilities require different–and sometimes opposing–solutions. We will begin with a tour of the different kinds of assistive technologies and devices used by people with various disabilities, and discuss how these devices affect the way people interact with web-based applications in general and Evergreen components in particular. We will review the recommended accessible design patterns for each major category of disabilities, and discuss how these apply to Evergreen.

Audience: General

The Evergreen Project (TEP) Board Meeting

The Evergreen Project Board annual meeting to welcome new incoming board members.

Worcester Public Library Social

Acquisitions Interest Group Meeting

The Acquisitions Interest Group is open to anyone who has an interest in acquisitions, regardless if they are currently using it or not.

Audience: General

System Administration Interest Group (notes)

The Evergreen System Administration Interest Group has met regularly every conference and is intended for those interested in or working with server or local system administration related to Evergreen, Linux, and many other magical things. With our emphasis on small group discussions, everyone is welcome to come participate, ask questions, and share their cool approaches to solving problems.

Audience: Technical

User Interface / User Experience Interest Group (slides)

The new Evergreen UI/UX Interest Group is intended for anyone interested in making the Evergreen user experience better. We will emphasize ways to participate and contribute with varying levels of technical expertise. Everyone is welcome to participate, ask questions, and share suggestions for this new group.

Audience: General

Reports Interest Group Meeting

A meeting of the Evergreen Reports Interest Group

Audience: General

Welcome and Announcements (recording)

Audience: General

Keynote: Data Security and Patron Privacy in today’s Library (recording | slides)

2023 Keynote: Privacy, Security & Access: Data Security and Patron Privacy

Audience: General

Morning Break

New Features in Evergreen 3.9 and 3.10 (recording | slides)

The Andrea and Ruth Show returns for the latest installment of the New Features update for the past year’s Evergreen ILS releases.

Audience: General

• Andrea Buntz Neiman, Equinox Open Library Initiative, Project Manager for Software Development, abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org
• Ruth Frasur, Evergreen Indiana, Consortium Coordinator, rfrasur@library.in.gov

Circulating Seeds (recording | slides)

When St. Thomas Library migrated to Evergreen they brought with them a collection of seeds that were seasonally refreshed and circulated. Their legacy system hadn’t had a way of easily matching their workflow for these non-traditional kind of checkouts but with Evergreen we implemented new action triggers reactors to easily handle their needs. Join us to learn about this great community service and how Evergreen was customized to meet the need.

Audience: End User

• Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst, EOLI, rogan.hamby@equinoxoli.org
• Aaron Devries, adevries@stthomas.ca, Digital and Support Services Manager, St. Thomas Public Library

Hosting Evergreen in Production (recording | slides)

If you’re a system admin or developer you’ve likely installed Evergreen, maybe even at this very event, but do you know the ins and outs of efficiently hosting a large highly-available OpenSRF cluster? It’s not as hard as it may sound; join me as we go beyond the basic installation instructions and turn reliability up to 11.

Audience: Technical

Lightning Talks on Open Source Evergreen Integrations and Discovery Layers (recording)

Quick 5-10 minute lightning talks related to Evergreen open source integrations and APIs with 3rd party vendor products and discovery layers

• Equinox Open Source Discovery Layers (slides)

You Don’t HAVE to Do It Yourself (recording | slides)

Many options are now available for hosted Evergreen, offering a range of services from fully-supported to do it yourself. The program will explore the options, based on NOBLE’s recent experience moving away from self-hosting.

Audience: General

Authority-Fest Redux(recording | slides)

A summary of Authority-Fest 2022, lessons learned since then, an update from the Authorities Working Group, and more brainstorming

Audience: End User

• Jennifer Weston, Senior Product and Education Specialist, Equinox Open Library Initiative, jennifer.weston@equinoxoli.org
• Jessica Efron, State Library of North Carolina, jessica.efron@ncdcr.gov

Best of Both Worlds: Libraries Leveraging BiblioCommons and Evergreen(recording | slides)

Public Libraries that want the flexibility and control of Evergreen and Open Source, but also want to create the best patron experience possible have leveraged the BiblioCommons suite of products. BiblioCommons integrates with Evergreen to provide a seamless patron experience across the catalog, website, and events management. Learn about the experience of working with BiblioCommons and Evergreen from King County Library System and hear case studies and patron feedback from Kenton County Library, Grand Rapids Library, and other libraries integrating BiblioCommons and Evergreen for the optimal experience for libraries and the patrons they serve.

Audience: Technical

• BJ Colvin, Director of Information Technology Services, King County Library System, bscolvin@kcls.org
• Erica Reynolds, VP Customer Success, BiblioCommons, erica.reynolds@bibliocommons.com

The Continuing Story of RediSRF with Bill (recording | presentation)

This will be a continuation of my 2022 conference presentation on replacing XMPP for OpenSRF. I’ll discuss how the design has evolved since the previous conference, give a general project update, and solicit feedback for how we want to move the project forward.

See presentation on GitHub: https://github.com/berick/Presentations/tree/master/Evergreen-2023

Audience: Technical

Consortial Communications: Getting Your Message Across (recording | slides)

With over 150 member libraries in the Pennsylvania Integrated Library System (PaILS) consortium, striking the right balance between too much and not enough communication can be difficult. How do consortial leaders ensure that their message gets to their intended audience? When it comes to larger projects such as upgrades and launching third-party vendors, how far ahead should you plan to start preparing your users? What (free & low-cost) tools exist to ensure your communications are aesthetically pleasing and represent your consortial branding? PaILS staff Katie Greenleaf Martin and Katherine Dannehl will share tips for consistent and substantive communication to your consortium’s membership.

Audience: General

• Katherine Dannehl, Membership Engagement Specialist, PaILS katherine.dannehl@sparkpa.org
• Katie Greenleaf Martin, Executive Director, PaILS kgm@sparkpa.org

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Permissions Were In) (recording | slides)

Permissions are essential to what *we* do, but trying to figure out what *they* do is complicated. This working session is open to all who are interested in discussing current permissions projects, brainstorming new approaches, and hopefully finding the meaning of EVERYTHING. Group work session to talk about the current status of the project and to share ideas.

Audience: End User

Afternoon Break and Vendor Showcase

Bib Magic – The Enhanced MARC Importer (recording | slides)

Ever needed Evergreen to have more records? Not just any records but the most tubular awesome records? Ten thousand records from a vendor, but you don’t like the raw records. They’re okay* but you wish that the 856$y had a different value and the first occurrence of the 650$2 was removed. And the 007 needs to go away. Apply scoped libraries to the 856$9. And, and and! Plus, you need these records synced up every week/month/year? What if I told you that this was possible? Not only possible, but easy! Look no further than the Bib Magic importer!

Audience: End User

Less Work, More PLAY(recording | slides)

The PINES Library Access for Youth (PLAY) program provides preK-12 public school students access to millions of fines-free physical and digital materials offered by Georgia PINES libraries. PINES developed a secure method for importing student data provided by school districts in order to automatically create and manage library accounts, reducing barriers to access for students and reducing manual intervention from library staff. This session will go over the process of batch creating accounts in Evergreen, lessons learned, and features and improvements added along the way.

Audience: General

Standing Requirements: The Explicit and Implicit Expectations of Evergreen (recording | slides)

The basic requirements of Evergreen as a piece of software can be succinctly described as help libraries maintain an inventory of resources that patrons can use to search and request those resources. The ramifications of that requirement include support for various workflows, but there are also a number of additional requirements.

During this presentation, Galen Charlton will discuss the full panoply of Evergreen’s standing requirements, including ones that are implicit or obscure. Accessibility, UX design, and internationalization all figure here as well as concerns specific to particular contributor communities within the project.

Attendees will leave the presentation with an understanding of the project’s standing requirements and a call to action to make the implicit explicit and managed.

Audience: Technical

Conference Reception

Cataloging Interest Group

The Cataloging Interest Group is open to anyone and everyone interested in Evergreen cataloging-related topics. Join us for a great group discussion!

Audience: General

• J. Elaine Hardy, PINES and Collaborative Projects Manager, ehardy@georgialibraries.org
• Jennifer Weston, Product and Education Specialist, Equinox Open Library Initiative, jennifer.weston@equinoxOLI.org

Consortia Leaders Round Table

A roundtable discussion for consortia leaders to talk about issues that face large shared instances of Evergreen.

Audience: General

New Developers Working Group

The New Developers Working Group is open to anyone who has an interest in learning more about coding for Evergreen, but very little experience. The goal of the group is to pool current knowledge, share and review code, and learn together.

Audience: Technical

Circulation Interest Group

Audience: General

Cataloging for Non-Catalogers: How Knowing Cataloging Can Help You in Your Library Job (recording | slides | printout)

So, you’re on the gameshow “Who Wants to be a Cataloger?” and you’re wondering how you ended up here. You aren’t a cataloger! You don’t even need to know cataloging in your library job! Come to this session to make sure you’re a million-dollar winner on the show! We will help you see how library staff, from circulation to administration, will benefit from knowing a bit of cataloging, and how it could help you in your job. (Encore presentation from 2022 *NEW & IMPROVED!*)

This program covers 6 areas of library service – Reference/Adult Services, Youth Services, Circulation, Systems/IT, Collection Development, and Administration – and how knowing a little bit about cataloging and MARC records can help any library staffer serve their customers better. Evergreen specifics will be included throughout the program.

Audience: End User

Making Life Easier With NCIP (recording | slides)

The Keystone State has long provided wide resource sharing through AccessPA, a system provided by a vendor to facilitate a union catalog. However, within the state Evergreen consortium they decided to streamline the workflow with NCIP. Join us to learn how the SPARK team and Equinox worked together to deploy a solution using NCIP with Evergreen and make life resource sharing a lot less button-click-y.

Audience: General

• Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst, rogan.hamby@equinoxoli.org, EOLI
• Katie Greenleaf Martin, PAILS, kgm@sparkpa.org, Executive Director PAILS
• Elizabeth Davis, elizabeth.davis@sparkpa.org, Support & Project Management Specialist
• Jason Boyer, jboyer@equinoxoli.org, Senior System Administrator, EOLI

Hey, what are you doing back there? Exposing some of Evergreen’s more useful features through OpenAPI (recording | slides)

Evergreen can do all sorts of neat tricks, and while the OpenSRF infrastructure provides programmatic access to its business logic, it can be difficult to use for a variety of reasons. We will show off a new RESTful OpenAPI interface that solves many of the complexity issues, is useful for 3rd party integrations and local custom development, and how it can be extended very simply to offer access to some of the hidden gems of Evergreen functionality.

Audience: Technical

Burnout in Open Source Communities (recording)

Burnout is a common problem in open-source communities that can ultimately cause anxiety, fatigue and stress to the contributors that we rely on to support the software, documentation, and outreach efforts. When left unchecked, it can also lead to contributions being ignored, missed roadmap deadlines, dropped projects, and, at its worst, key contributors leaving the community. In this talk, we’ll look at open-source burnout, using real data from the Evergreen community; review how contributors can deal with their own burnout; and, more importantly, how libraries and vendors can encourage contributions and make other key decisions to help existing contributors.

Audience: ALL

Morning Break

Hold Groups: One Library’s Story(recording | slides) 

Hold Groups take the onus off of patrons for placing holds on new books by their favorite authors. Scenic Regional Library in Missouri began discussing Hold Groups in the spring of 2022 and made the first Hold Groups available to patrons in October 2022. Hear the story of our planning, implementation, and how it is working for us.

Audience: End User

Well isn’t that Special: Cataloging Special formats in Evergreen (recording | slides)

This presentation will discuss cataloging of special formats. Will include points such as: What makes these formats special, where to find information on best practices, which rules must be followed, when can you use catalogers judgement, and what fields control the icon(s).

Audience: General

Batches, Baskets, Buckets, Bookbags, and Carousels (recording | slides)

Overview of the different ways to work with batches of items and bibs in Evergreen, including item status batches, item and record buckets, My Lists/Bookbags, and carousels with lots of examples and tips and tricks.

Audience: Technical

Lunch Break

Lightning Talks (recording)

Quick 5-10 minute talks on anything Evergreen related.

• 2023 DIG Presentation, Debbie Luchenbill
• Evergreen Inventory (Community Ask 2023), Andrea Buntz Neiman
• Blakes Docker slides
• Using AI and LLM to scale productivity, Ruth Frasur
• On the proper use of pillows in Evergreen, Galen Charlton
• Community Onboarding, Stephanie Leary

How Two Library Consortia Approach Staff Account Security (recording | slides)

Managing staff accounts can be a juggling act. Join the staff of NC Cardinal and PaILS as we discuss the various technical and less technical layers of staff account management and permissions that we’ve implemented in our respective consortia. We’ll discuss topics such as permission projects, management of accounts across a consortium, as well as development for the safety and security of ILS accounts & data.

Audience: General

• Katie Greenleaf Martin, Executive Director, PaILS, kgm@sparkpa.org 
•  Elizabeth Davis, Support and Project Management Specialist, PaILS, elizabeth.davis@sparkpa.org 
• Llewellyn Marshall, NC Cardinal Administrator / Developer llewellyn.marshall@ncdcr.gov 
• Benjamin Murphy, NC Cardinal Program Manager, benjamin.murphy@ncdcr.gov

Slouching towards BIBFRAME: An Overview of Current Possibilities(recording | slides)

BIBFRAME is a shapeshifter: it is both the focus of serious testing and production projects by academic and national libraries and a mystery with an unclear path forward to adoption by public libraries… and Evergreen.

Galen Charlton will provide an overview of recent developments in BIBFRAME tools with a focus on what has evolved towards a practical use of the technology.

Attendees will leave the session with a better understanding of the state of BIBFRAME and more information to inform a broad community discussion of Library Linked Data and Evergreen.

Audience: Technical

Contributing to Evergreen (No Code Required!) (recording | slides)

Although coders are always welcome to submit new features and bug fixes to the Evergreen software project, it is also essential that end-users of Evergreen contribute expertise and experience through testing and feedback to continually grow and improve the end product. The more that people in different roles get involved, the better Evergreen becomes! This session will walk you through some of the ways that you can participate through interest groups, Bug Squashing Weeks, Launchpad feedback, documentation projects, and more.

Audience: End User

Afternoon Break

Down the Rabbit Hole: a Journey through Evergreen’s Database (recording | slides)

This presentation will be an overview of the PostgreSQL database that is the heart of the Evergreen system. Whenever you catalog a title, register a patron, check out a book, or enter other information in the system, that data gets processed and stored in the database.

We will take a look at how the database is organized, where different types of data are stored and ways you can access it.

Audience: Technical

Achieving Fulfillment (recording | slides)

Evergreen has a sibling named Fulfillment, an application made to allow for wide spread and low effort interlibrary loan among libraries. Join us as we discuss the history of its shared code with Evergreen, ongoing development, what makes it special and learn if it might help you expand sharing with other libraries, regardless of ILS.

Audience: General

• Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst, rogan.hamby@equinoxoli.org, EOLI
• Andrea Buntz Neiman, Project Manager for Software Development, abneiman@equinoxoli.org, EOLI
• Mike Rylander, Research and Development Manager, miker@equinoxoli.org, EOLI
• Jessica Woolford, jwoolford@biblio.org, Evergreen Systems Manager, Bibliomation

Teamwork Makes the Herding Cats Dream Work: Cataloging in a Consortium(recording | slides)

Whether a consortium’s cataloguing is centralised, partially-distributed, or fully-distributed, it’s crucial for members to agree upon policies, guidelines, and best practices. This presentation will review some of the challenges faced by two consortia and how they approach wrangling cataloguing communities of 60-150+ libraries.

Audience: End User

• Kate Coleman (Technical Services Manager, Jefferson County Library) kcoleman@jeffcolib.org
• Liz Rudloff (Consortium Cataloger, Missouri Evergreen Consortium) cataloger@moevergreenlibraries.org
• Carol Witt, Bibliographic Services Supervisor, CW MARS, cwitt@cwmars.org

The Evergreen Project Board Update

Audience: General

Developer Update (slides)

Audience: General

Interest Group Updates

Audience: General

Future of Evergreen: Strategic Priorities Around Privacy and Security

Round table community discussion from multiple Evergreen sites. What is your library doing to prepare for a potential data breach? What steps have you taken or are taking to better protect patron privacy and data?

Audience: General