Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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Pile o’ stuff

Wow. It’s been a crazy two months. We’ve been going strong, if silent, and overall things have been going swimmingly. Some highlights:

  • The mailing lists finally got busy (yay!), and to help sort through some of our growing pains we put together a document to help early adopters and contributors to get their feet wet
  • Brought on a new system, South Georgia Regional, during the first half of December and they’ve been humming right along
  • Added snazzy new back-end storage and search functionality which should allow all sorts of new data access patterns
  • Brought on another new system, Thomas County Public, on February 1st while I (miker) was at…
  • …the Ontario Library Association’s Super Conference talking about metadata normalization and how generally and specifically we can use said to increase the utility of the OPAC for our patrons
  • Bill headed up north to Rochester, NY, to attend the XC (eXtensable Catalog) partners meeting — for which I am very jealous, as he got to meet the (in)famous Roy Tennent
  • And, last but not least, we managed to squeeze Evergreen version 1.0.2 out the door. You can expect more frequent release in the near term, and we are currently targeting sometime this spring for 1.2.0

All in all, we really should have filled up several pages here, so … sorry. 🙂 Perhaps some more detail will come soon…

University of Windsor and Evergreen

I am pleased to announce that the University of Windsor has partnered up with the Georgia Public Library Service to work on the Evergreen acquisitions module. Beginning in January 2007, staff from Windsor and GPLS will begin to collaborate on software specifications and development.

A possible building block could be OFBiz, an Open Source ERP application that has almost completed the Apache incubation process, a significant sign of achievement for OSS projects. Although the public side of the ILS has recently received considerable attention from the library community, the possibilities for enhancing some of the lower level processing layers in a library’s operations through OSS are also significant. Representatives from the Georgia Public Library Service recently participated in a symposium on the future of the ILS that was hosted by the University of Windsor, and working together to explore the architecture of a next generation acquisitions system is a strong move toward creating new options for long-standing ILS functions.

For the Good of the Many

Last time I wrote about our UTF-8 escaping machinery. It’s not that involved, but it’s something critical to get Right(tm) for proper unicode support. It’s also something that took me far too much time to complete, being something that nearly all modern data handling programs need to do. Let’s all hope that someone can benefit from my travails, my dark journey into the Mordor that is the Unicode and UTF-8 RFCs.

With that behind me, and nothing but green pastures of holiday vacation time ahead, I ambled over to the #code4lib IRC channel to see what was up. Well, lo and behold, someone was heaving mightily at a pile of MARC that was claiming to be about books but was most assuredly describing some conference proceedings. This got me thinking about the code we have buried in Evergreen for investigating these sorts of arcana encoded in library data. And it is with that introduction, and a hope for some extra positive karma, that I present to you, dear reader, a pair files that I hope will be of use in one endeavor or another, should you need to know what the percent cloud cover is contained in your remote sensing image or you just want to know if you have any Earth moon globes made of skins (yes, skins).
[Read more…] about For the Good of the Many