Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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Laundry List

It’s been a while, but here’s just some of what I’ve personally been doing during this latest stretch of radio silence:

  • In-database circulation permit calculation — ~5ms instead of ~100ms for arbitrarily complex circ rules
  • In-database hold permit calculation — ~5ms, down from about 50ms
  • In-database relevance rank adjustments — configure relative weights and have them take effect immediately
  • Native SRU interface (full CQL bibliographic searching context set) with Z39.50 based on Simple2ZOOM
  • Rewritten search code — no more stalls on overly common search terms, and much faster in general
  • Per-object permissions
  • I18N infrastructure for in-database strings (Library names, etc)
  • Infrastructure required for in-database record ingest (coming this summer)
  • Acquisitions and serials data modeling
  • Exposing many preexisting back-end features to the OPAC (advanced query syntax, resort and limit to available after search, etc)
  • Work on some other Evergreen-based ideas

And yes, like everybody else, I’ve added Google Book Search to the Evergreen catalog.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the development that’s been going on recently. ACQ is coming along, the OPAC is getting friendlier, patron self-service options are expanding, full I18N is now just a matter of string removal (and we have both French-Canadian and simplified Chinese translations) … the list is far too long for me to remember on a cloudy Saturday morning.

–miker

“We want to emulate the PINES experience”

One of the interesting aspects of working with Evergreen is the phone calls from large consortia or state libraries wishing to start large resource sharing networks like PINES. I believe there was a latent demand by the library community–particularly from library users–for ILS software capable of managing large networks that has now been met by Evergreen.

While Evergreen is happy running on small libraries, it does have a unique niche in large consortia because of its distributed database architecture, the OpenSRF backend, and its robustness. This structure allows small libraries to run Evergreen with one server and large consortia to run Evergreen by adding more servers.

A few days ago I reported on the highest circulations so far in PINES for a day (96,000), an hour (11.300) and a minute (548). What was not mentioned is that these transactions occurred while there were one thousand terminals logged into the database being used by library staff who were checking out those materials, cataloging books, and doing other activities that changed the database. There are 275 library outlets spread across a state using Evergreen and this network circulates about 19 million items a year.

The underlying breakthrough is not only the ability of the database to scale but also the ability to handle a high level of changes from many sources to the database–the heart of so much in the consortium. No other ILS software, proprietary or open source can currently handle this kind of large consortium so gracefully.

In database speak, data silos are relatively small and separate databases that talk to each other with difficulty. Silos are the bane of analysts who have to pierce the spread-out databases to get a coherent picture of, say, the state of a company when each department has its own data in formats that do not integrate with those of other departments. It is similar in the library world: many small libraries that communicate only with difficulty. Any citizen of Georgia can get a PINES card and we know that library patrons are bypassing non-PINES libraries in order to get access to PINES at member libraries. By those actions, they are able to use the materials in a large, virtual library. When library users have a choice, they will break down library silos. Welcome to a long tail world.

Now, the politics is a bit awkward because there are librarians who either do not see the handwriting on the wall or prefer business as usual. In the age of Google, library users have been educated to expect better than that from their libraries.

It is curious that it took leadership from a state library and an open source community to create software with Evergreen’s capabilities and that it never came from legacy vendors.

Bob Molyneux

Code4lib 2008 (Mini) Roundup

I’ve been to my share of library conferences over the last couple of years. They all have something to offer in their own way: networking, schmoozing, wacky vendor displays, swag, etc. It’s been my experience, though, that as a geek/developer, I’m often a little disappointed at the content — it’s just not geared toward someone like me. This is why I love Code4lib. The conference is densely packed with interesting technical presentations. They are the kind of talks that not only inspire you, they give you something concrete to take back home. In addition to the presentations, you are surrounded by an interesting gang of library technologists, who, I get the sense, all have tricks up their sleeves. It makes for a fulfilling week, to say the least.

Some highlights

My week started with the Evergreen pre-conference, skillfully lead by Dan Scott. Dan blogged about it here. Apart from some technical woes, a lot was seen and (hopefully) learned by all. We performed the install, imported bib and holdings data, implemented new functionality (new OpenSRF method and OPAC UI) to email a user their password if they have forgotten it, and took a quick look at some of the staff client interfaces.

Conference day 1 began with Brewster Kahle’s keynote address on his work with archive.org and openlibrary.org. Brewster’s vision and chutzpah is refreshing and inspiring. The goal of “One wiki page per book” sounds so simple (and obvious) when inserted into a slide show, but the implementation will require tremendous work and resources. I applaud their efforts, not only in principle, but because I think it will lead to better information and resource sharing in the long run.

After lunch, Winona Salesky and Michael Park did a joint presentation called “XForms for Metadata Creation”, which included two different MODS editors developed with XForms. I liked this talk in particular for two reasons. For starters, the demos I saw were that of a simple (yet powerful) bibliographic data creation interface, which I see as potentially useful for any ILS. Additionally, the use of XForms, which I only have a basic understanding of, gave me a chance to see some new (for me) technology in action. My interest is piqued.

I skipped the breakout sessions that day to put together a (5 minute) lightning talk on Pylons. One of the interesting challenges of lightning talks is the use of a shared PC and what amounts to a moratorium on web access for the sake of efficiency. My presentation was a set of images and screenshots, the first a crane on a sunny Portland day, which seemed apropos of the topic. I discussed one particular aspect of Pylons, which allows you to easily plug in custom pre and post-processing middleware applications for your web apps. I demonstrated a simple XML validator and a highlighting plugin which bolded pre-defined terms in the HTML on its way to the client. These gave me the chance to dig a little deeper into Pylons, an architecture which I think has a lot of interesting potential.

Wednesday morning I learned a lot about RDA. Later, I thought the discussion on of the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force segued well into Ross Singer’s lightning talk on Jangle, which, as Ross pointed out, could be used to implement the proposed standardized ILS interface.

I was not able to attend the last day, so I missed a chunk of the conference, including Dan’s CouchDB talk. Glad it went well, Dan!

Wow, now I realize why most folks blog about conferences as they are happening 😉 It’s a lot to digest, especially for a conference as dense as code4lib. There were a lot of great presentations, breakout sessions, and lightning talks this year and this post only comments on a few of them. Next year’s conference will be held in Providence, RI, and if you can, I would recommend checking it out.

-bill