If you had asked me three weeks ago how one might go about creating a federated search interface that could intelligently combine the results from academic and public libraries, I would have shrugged. If you had then asked how one might go about integrating search results from other sources, such as online journal indexes, weblogs, Amazon.com and Google I might have laughed. But if you had waited another week and asked I would have pointed you to this.
Filler
So I’ve been pretty slack about posting dev stuff as of late. I can blame most of my silence on being busy writing code, but I won’t have that excuse pretty soon. With any luck we’ll be able to slow down a bit after July (watch for the alpha release!) and I’ll get to do some brain dumping here.
Circulation Demo Release
The Evergreen software development team has spent the past couple of days attending the PINES Annual Membership meeting and demonstrating the progress we’ve made so far with Evergreen. We are now ready to release the circulation demo to everyone, and instructions are below for accessing the software.
Also, on a related topic, we’ve come to an important milestone in the Evergreen project. When we started on this path, we determined that we would stop approximately a year into the project, assess our progress, and determine if we should continue. We’ve come to this point, and the PINES Executive Committee has unanimously “blessed” the Evergreen project, and gave their permission for the project to continue. We’re very excited about this decision.
Back to the Circulation demo, this release includes some new basic circulation functionality as well as some previously released cataloging functionality. Also, ahead of schedule, a portion of the re-made Evergreen OPAC is back and ready for review. The partial demo OPAC is available here: http://gapines.org/opac/