Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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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).
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a peek at implementing a feature in Evergreen

In PINES, catalogers work mostly through OCLC, so the functionality for directly creating local MARC records was always being pushed low on my priority list. But today is their lucky day, and perhaps an unlucky day for you, because I’m going to share some of the process. 😀

Warning: If you’re not a software developer, this blog entry will likely bore you to tears, and if you are a software developer, it’s still likely. Reader beware.

Disclaimer: I’m the staff client developer, so my perspective is focused on only a small part of Evergreen as whole, and I shamelessly embrace all the abstractions Mike (database guru) and Bill (middle layer guru) afford me with their code. I also shamelessly peek behind (not break) the abstractions to see how stuff works, so that I don’t have to bug them with so many questions.

The requirements for this function is pretty simple. Take a handful of MARC files from Bin, PINES’ head cataloger, and offer them as templates to cataloging staff through the staff client program. Staff will edit a template as a new record, and when they’re finished it will receive an auto-generated title control number. A lot of the functionality needed is already in place, and the interface is stubbed out in the menu system, so hopefully this will be a short post. We’ll see. 😉

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