Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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Smorgasbord

I have a smorgasbord of stuff I want to talk about today. Some of these are recurring questions the PINES/Evergreen team seems to get, some are in response to issues raised in library blog-land or email lists, and a couple are news from the development group. There’s something for everyone on this buffet of a blog entry. Grab your plate and come ‘on.

Software Releases

Our baby Evergreen is all grown up. *sniffs* It was our intention to push out an official 1.0 release prior to go-live, but that goal fell down the priority list as the migration approached. Now that the migration rush has passed, expect an official Evergreen 1.0 release soon. Of course, the full software is available from the code repository any time.

In related news, we’re starting the initial planning for Evergreen 2, and acquisitions and serials control are the big features planned for the next release. Just quickly looking around, acquisitions is an area where many of our problems may already be solved in the larger software world. All kinds of folks need to do stuff like order widgets and track accounts. If anyone out there has a suggestion for an open-source software package that may fit in this slot, drop us a line.

“Free” Software

This is something I’ve seen repeatedly in library blog-land and on email lists: “Evergreen [or insert your favorite open source software here] is not really free. Resources have to be devoted to installing, supporting, and maintaining the software.”

Well, duh, of course you’re going to have to devote resources to run an ILS. Sure, Evergreen is cool and all, but it doesn’t pop itself out of the box and start intelligently going to work and maintaining itself. There is no such thing.

Evergreen is a tool… a complex tool, sure, but it’s just a tool. Pretend for a moment we’re all in the earth-moving business instead of librarianship. Evergreen is a big bulldozer, and anyone can go and pick up a copy of the Evergreen Bulldozer for free. Now, you still have to hire someone to drive the bulldozer, you need an engineer to figure out how you want to use the bulldozer, you need a mechanic to maintain the bulldozer, and you need fuel to keep it going.

But, more important than the [no] cost of acquiring the bulldozer, you have the power to take it apart, see how it works, and even improve on it. We have no trade secrets; how this thing works is not locked up and closed-source.

Evergreen is both free as in speech and free as in beer. What you do with it after you acquire it is up to you.

Community

We believe an important aspect of the success of an open source project is the growth and development of a community of users and developers around the software. We’ve largely taken a “build it and they will come” approach and a fledgling community has, as expected, popped up. We want to continue this growth, and eventually foster a large, thriving Evergreen community. If you’re reading this, then there is a good chance you have some interest in the project and software, so, I ask you: do you have any community-building ideas?

Upcoming Appearances

Representatives from the PINES/Evergreen team will be at the following upcoming events/conferences:

Migration Post-Mortem

PINES is circulating books. Patrons are finding stuff. Catalogers are cataloging. PINES central staff members are still in-country and not in fear for their lives. We’ve done it, but we didn’t get here without a lot of hard work and lessons learned. For posterity’s sake, herein lies the tome of the Evergreen migration. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

What we did right

  • We sent our patron data to Unique Management Services for clean up. This made the job of importing the patron data oh-so-much easier. Rob Klaus, you rock!
  • We performed multiple dry-run migrations. This was useful in ensuring our data migration plan was sound from A to Z.
  • We asked some library staff around the state to look at the dry run data, and to double-check us. This proved helpful in identifying translation problems before they became a problem in the real system.

What we did wrong

  • The biggest one: lack of sleep. On Tuesday morning, when bugs and other issues started popping up, the development team was running on no sleep. We wanted things to be perfect on day 1, and I think we pushed too hard, when we should have left good enough alone, and gotten some sleep. So, when our troops hit the beachhead on Tuesday morning, we were not sharp at all.
  • We recently lost the PINES/GPLS Helpdesk Manager, and this position was not filled by go-live. (Our new Helpdesk Manager just started last week). I’m not sure if this is something we did “wrong”, but the lack of a Helpdesk Manager had a significant negative impact on the PINES support structure.
  • We didn’t write up any “what to do if…” documents for the libraries prior to go-live. There was confusion about which way to go, and email is not a good medium for transporting urgent messages on go-live morning.
  • We didn’t anticipate the immediate increase of OPAC usage. When a tool isn’t painful to use, people seem to use it more. (Imagine that.) It also helps when the catalog kind of pretty to look at.
  • In order to troubleshoot issues, we had to turn logging levels up on the production system. The sheer amount of log traffic swamped the central logger servers, and in turn, made finding pertinent log entries extremely difficult. We have learned we need much more robust central logging servers.
  • We didn’t have a dedicated training cluster. This is a scarce resources issue, and it hurt us. Given the resources, we should have trained PINES library staff on a training cluster with real data instead of relying on the demo system (and demo data) for training.
  • Related to the no sleep bullet above, we waited too long before pulling non-essential services. In hindsight it seems obvious, but at the time it wasn’t on any of our radars for some reason.

That’s a lot more bullets in the negative column than the positive, and I don’t want the folks to get the wrong idea. No ILS migration is easy. I think most librarians had rather subject themselves to a million papercuts than migrate ILS’s. However, I think as far as migrations go, this has been a roaring success, not even close to worthy of papercut torture. I think this is especially true when the scope of the PINES system is taken into consideration. We have taken an enormous leap forward, at warp speed. The proof is in the pudding.

So, who’s ready for Evergreen v2? 🙂

Success

The past 5 days have been super-busy, as anyone who has migrated ILS’s knows. Bottom line: we made it. PINES is running on Evergreen. We really appreciate all of the well-wishes and support we received during this stressful time.

We’re planning on writing up a full post-mortem on the migration and go-live as soon as things slow down around here.