Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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What’s in a name? (open-ils.org to evergreen-ils.org)

Rose, Artista, Johannesburg Botanical GardenThe Evergreen community has been discussing changing the domain for Evergreen’s project site from open-ils.org to evergreen-ils.org.

“Discussion” may be too strong a word… it’s more like consensus, at least from members of the Evergreen community who have been reading the list the last two weeks. The majority opinion seems to be that this has been a “round tuit” that just needing getting-around-to.

In case you’re wondering, evergreen-ils.org is in place and functioning right now… the name was reserved to prevent squatters, and it made sense to make it an alternate name no matter what.

open-ils will probably never disappear entirely. As the original name for the software that became Evergreen, open-ils is embedded in the code, used for the names of the Evergreen discussion lists, and also appears in the name of the Evergreen IRC channel.The blog and the documentation wiki convert to the new name rather nicely, but we’ll see open-ils in the wild for some time to come.

(And of course, open-ils.org will continue to respond to requests.)

Any last thoughts out there? A related question arose about creating a tagline for Evergreen, to retain the word “open” in its description — might be a nice touch, as well as a homage to the innovation and dedication that gave this project life and breath.

— Karen, Equinox Community Librarian

Evergreen Version 1.2.3 Released

Evergreen version 1.2.3 was released August 5, 2008.

New features in 1.2.3 include a Shelving Location search filter, search configuration parameters, the ability to set the per-circulation maximum fine amount to a percentage (including more than 100%) of the item price, web-based Self-Checkout functionality (Evergreen has supported SIP2 since its first release, but this is a non-SIP self-check option), and support for XML-only Z39.50 servers, such as MARCXML-backed Zebra installations.

Bugs fixed in this release include two new reporter operators, report editor display (horizontal scrolling) issues, potential encoding problems for RSS and Atom feeds, fine interval parsing, and enhancements for single-location installations.

For more information about this release, see this high-level roadmap or visit the 1.2.3 release page on Evergreen’s documentation wiki.

Release 1.4 is due out September, 2008, and its planned features can also be viewed at the high-level roadmap.

Community Update: New Features in 1.4 and Platform Heads-up

This post offers a heads-up about features in Evergreen 1.4, the next major Evergreen release, due out by early fall 2008, and also offers some information specific to PostgreSQL and OpenSRF.

New features in Evergreen 1.4

Internationalization support for the OPAC and staff client. User interfaces, messages, currencies, dates, etc. will all be displayed according to the chosen locale of the user, and will be able to be switched dynamically. We will need translators; a call for volunteer translators will go out soon!

Online payments, originally scheduled for the 2.0 release, will actually be introduced in the 1.4 release this summer, thanks to the contribution of Niles Ingalls at Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library in Zionsville, IN.

Z39.50 and SRU server support. Evergreen will now be able to act as a Z39.50 server and a SRU server — an important feature for interlibrary loan, federated search, and other library applications.

Ability to search across defined groups of libraries, rather than just hierarchical sets of libraries (affectionately called “org_unit lassos” because they bind arbitrary sets of org_units together in a single search group)

Reminder notices, also known as pre-overdue notices, will be part of the 1.4 release.

Record loading in 1.4. Just to clarify, bibliographic data will still need to be loaded in MARC21 format; libraries that currently have UNIMARC data will need to convert it to MARC21 using a tool like MARCON to use Evergreen.

Platform heads-up for Evergreen 1.4

PostgreSQL 8.2 for Evergreen 1.4 (dropping support for PostgreSQL 8.1, no official support for PostgreSQL 8.3 yet). PostgreSQL 8.2 offers better performance and some significant feature enhancements over PostgreSQL 8.1; therefore, we strongly suggest that any new sites deploy Evergreen on PostgreSQL 8.2 and will be dropping support for PostgreSQL 8.1 with the Evergreen 1.4 release this summer.

PostgreSQL 8.3+ for Evergreen 2.0

We are currently working on adding support for PostgreSQL 8.3, which brings even more performance and feature enhancements to the table, but which also requires a refactoring of some of our code base. Therefore, we are holding off on official support for PostgreSQL 8.3 until the Evergreen 2.0 release in the spring 2009 time frame, to ensure that the changes have been thoroughly tested.

OpenSRF 1.0 for Evergreen 1.4

OpenSRF 1.0 will be the minimum required version for Evergreen 1.4. (Open Service Request Framework, pronounced “open-surf,” is the software architecture at the core of Evergreen, invented by Evergreen’s developers.)

OpenSRF 0.9 has served us well since July 2007, but the performance enhancements, new features (such as OpenSRF-over-HTTP), and usability improvements in OpenSRF 1.0 make it a mandatory upgrade. The build system for OpenSRF 1.0 has been standardized with the use of autoconf & automake, so installing and configuring OpenSRF 1.0 will be a snap.

(Special thanks to Dan Scott for help with this post!)