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.

[Read more…] about Filler

For now, let’s look at the Patron Search interface. Click Search -> Patrons from the top menubar.

A search for GA in the State field will retrieve most of the test patrons we created. There are no real patrons in this demo. You can choose what columns appear in the search results and in what order (try dragging the column headers), and eventually you’ll be able to sort on any column.

Notice how we can step through each patron and have summary information appear in the left pane. Anytime you deal with patrons in an interface, you will have the same patron summary pane on the left. It also serves as a launch pad for other services you can perform for that patron, such as Check Out and Holds.

Let’s edit this patron by clicking on the Edit button in the patron summary pane:

Right now we don’t have a lot of input-validation and error-checking in this interface, however, almost everything is available for editing. The Patron Registration interface (Circulation -> Register Patron) is identical to the edit interface.

One useful feature is that we allow libraries to create local statistical categories that they may assign to patrons (and copies, for that matter).

These show up on the patron summary pane, and the values for a patron’s stat cats are editable in the patron edit interface. The stat cats themselves can be defined and edited under Admin -> Patron Stat Cat Editor:

After some discussion here at PINES central, we’ve decided it would be advantageous to change the release date for the Evergreen Circulation Demo to coincide with the PINES Annual Membership meeting. Our original release date was May 13th. We have decided to change the release date to May 18th, the day that the Evergreen development staff is scheduled to demonstrate the system at the PINES Annual Membership meeting. After we have completed our demonstration, we will post the demo on the website so that everyone can take a look.

We have also decided to change the date of the Evergreen Alpha release. Our original expected release date was July 1st. We’ve decided to change that to a more broad release date; expect the Evergreen Alpha release in July 2005. One of us is getting married, some of us want to take a vacation this summer, and we don’t want to rush this important release.

We hope to see many of you at the PINES Annual Membership Meeting.