Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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Evergreen Pre-Beta Release

The Evergreen Pre-Beta is here. For the impatient that just want to jump in: the OPAC is at http://demo.gapines.org. We strongly recommend Firefox when viewing the OPAC. The staff client is available for download from http://www.open-ils.org/cvs.html.

Okay, for those that are still reading: there is still a ton of work to do before Evergreen hits the production release this summer. This pre-beta release has an incomplete set of features, and still has bugs that will be repaired over the course of the next 6 months. You can view the Evergreen development group’s “to do” lists on our documentation wiki at http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/. There is one for the OPAC, one for the Staff Client, one for Reporting, and a General todo list. The various todo lists contain a mixture of bugs and feature requirements that we’re working on. When a particular item is completed, it is crossed out on the list (you’ll see that many have already been completed).

We held 5 PINES subcommittees meetings (OPAC, Circulation, Cataloging, Reporting, and ILS Advisory) in February and early March to get feedback and suggestions in regards to the software. Thanks to those of you that participated in these meetings– they were extremely helpful to us to ensure that development was on the correct course, and they helped solidify the Evergreen version 1.0 picture.

So, now what? Take a look at the software and the todo lists, then tell us what you think. Probably the best place to send feedback or questions is to the mailing lists, so everyone can participate in the conversation. Over the next few months, we’re steadily going to work through the todo lists, perform load testing, write documentation, come up with training materials and dates, and start working on the PINES data migration plan. We plan to release a full-featured Beta in May, a production release (version 1.0) in July, and the PINES go-live is scheduled for September 5th, 2006. PINES library staff will be getting specific information and direction on all of this soon.

Another project we’re working on is an OPAC useability survey for patrons. It will ask participants to look at and use the OPAC, to try certain tasks, and to provide feedback to the development team from a patron’s perspective. We’ll send out a link to the survey when it’s completed. We’d be grateful if you could corner some of your patrons, ask them to take a look at the OPAC, and help us all out with their comments and suggestions.

Autohorntootery

The whole 2.0 meme tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth, and when used by the more — shall we say, vociferous — proponents of the principles behind the title it has been known to cause me to suffer a bad case of the dry heaves. That being said, and noting that he is certainly not one of those that cause me convulsions, I think the OpenILS/Evergreen project owes John Blyberg a very big thank you for explaining, if offhandedly and by accident, exactly what we are all about.

[Read more…] about Autohorntootery

Quicker SuperCat update

I said coming soon, and I meant it! 😉 Here‘s the HTML output from an OpenSearch 1.1 Atom feed, rendered server side to include unAPI.

So, here’s the stack that generates that page

  • The open-ils.storage OpenSRF application acts a distributed ORM for all of OpenILS’s persistent storage needs.
  • We have applications called open-ils.search and open-ils.actor that give simple access to raw search methods, as well as library and user lookups (actors).
  • My shiny new open-ils.supercat application provides a simpler interface to the catalog portions of the storage application
  • The mod_perl module that gives open-ils.supercat a friendlier API lives here, and is slowly but surely growing an appendage that’s shaped like a generic XML feed generator.
  • The html “feed” type is actually an Atom feed that has its own special toString method that pushes the Atom through a hacked up version of A9’s atom->html XSLT before it gets sent off to your browser. I added the ability to expose the unAPI links and identifiers I embed in my Atom OS output, as well as tweaked the layout a bit, but basically it’s what A9 put out under a Creative Commons license.
  • Then, just to make IE happy, there’s a client side XSLT that essentially replaces the entire content of the page with a copy of itself. No, I’m not kidding. I had to do that to get this thing working in IE.

Anyway, someone with more UI skillz can come along and pretty it up a bit (let’s hope they do), but it works, and it only took about an hour — aside from my epic battle with IE — to get it working mostly the way I wanted. This bodes well, methinks, for the future of SuperCat and the write-oriented interfaces I have planned.

Now I just need to find an artist to create a great logo! Dan suggests “a super-hero cat wearing a cape, and the cape should have an iconic logo of itself on the cape… napping.” Sounds good to me. Anyone know a good artist that likes cats and OSS?