Olly olly oxen free: users of Evergreen APIs, stand up and be counted


Does your project, service, or product interact with Evergreen in some automated fashion?  If so, we’d like to hear from you.

I’m using the phrase “automated fashion” very broadly.  There are many ways to receive data from an Evergreen system, update data in an Evergreen database, or make transactions happen.  A few of these ways include:

  • XML-RPC calls to invoke Evergreen service methods
  • SIP2 to perform patron and circulation requests
  • Z39.50, unAPI, and OpenSearch to retrieve catalog data
  • MARC exports and imports
  • Screen-scraping (although if you’re screen-scraping Evergreen, we may be able to suggest a better way to do it)
  • Interacting with the Evergreen staff client
  • Direct database access
  • And others

Some of the things we’d like to know include:

  • The name of your service or product
  • What it does for an Evergreen library
  • How it is accessing Evergreen
  • Whether there are specific APIs or entry points that your application depends on
  • If there are things that Evergreen could be doing to make your life easier

We want to hear from everybody, whether you are a consortium that has integrated Evergreen with other software, an Evergreen support group,  a vendor providing products or services to libraries, or a member of a free software project whose software talks with Evergreen.  If you work for an Evergreen library and know that Evergreen works with another service, we want to hear from you too, even if you don’t know how Evergreen is doing the talking.

Why do we want to know?  Our reasons include:

  • Finding out which entry points we should be particularly careful about changing as Evergreen gets enhanced.
  • See if there are things we could be doing better to encourage more people and applications to participate in the Evergreen ecosystem.
  • (Maybe) putting together a list of third-party services that interact with Evergreen.

To respond, please comment on this post.