Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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Evergreen has reached Beta

It’s hard to believe it has been almost 2 years since we started down the path to create a powerful, flexible, open source, enterprise-class ILS. I’m very happy to report today that we’ve reach an important milestone on this journey: Beta.

The PINES libraries have already been working hard on an internal release of the Evergreen Beta, giving us suggestions and feedback on how to make the software better. Know that we’re going to be working steadily between now and the Production release this summer tweaking and improving the software.

The Evergreen staff client is available for download at http://www.open-ils.org/cvs.html.

The Evergreen online catalog is available at http://demo.gapines.org.

Of course, as always, you can get the source code from our public CVS respository at http://open-ils.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/.

Documentation is growing on the wiki at http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php.

Give Evergreen a test drive and tell us what you think.

Behind the Curtain

In about every meeting or presentation we participate in, we’re asked about the PINES/Evergreen servers, what they are, where they live, how many there are… basically, what is behind the green curtain? Some PINES librarians that attended the focus group meetings we held in February got an opportunity to take a tour of the datacenter and see the PINES server cluster for themselves. Unfortunately, for the rest of you, we’ve had to resort to whiteboard drawings and obtuse hand gestures.

[Read more…] about Behind the Curtain

A few quick platform updates

  • We’ve decided to move all RDBMS development to MySQL. MS Sequel Server was a close second, but since Oracle bought up all the MySQL storage engines of consequence, what could go wrong?!?!
  • We’ll be moving all first generation OpenSRF applications to Python, because, well, I was wrong. Whitespace is syntax.
  • Also, no more JSON. We’re going RDF all the way, baby!
  • I’ve seen the error of my ways with SuperCat. Instead of trying to supply a secure, abstracted, simple interface to the catalog I will simply put a thin XML wrapper on top of the new MySQL database. Sure, there will be security issues if anyone figures out the names of tables containing user data, but how can they know that if I don’t document them. Problem solved!

Ok .. I didn’t even try to make it believable. I was going for a “it’s so crazy it might just work” angle. Eh, eh?

UPDATE: As noticed by Ross, we failed to address the Library 2.0 functionality. To that end we’ll be replacing all subject authority data with user supplied tags. You’ll do our cataloging for us via a Z39.50 interface. What’s more Library 2.0 than that, I ask you!