The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that August’s Contributor of the Month is Sylvia Orner. Sylvia is the Head of Technical Services at the Scranton Public Library, which is part of the PaILS Consortium.  Sylvia also currently serves as the Chair of PaILS’s Cataloging Committee.

One of our reasons for highlighting Sylvia this month is that she is a great example of someone whose local and state-level work have larger ramifications in the Evergreen Community — she has been able to effect changes that benefit all Evergreen users. “Just show up,” she says. “If there’s things that you can participate in, in your own state or consortium, get involved that way.”

Sylvia mentioned being particularly proud of the improvements to Patron Requests, released in 3.2. This project, funded by PaILS and Evergreen Indiana, ported the Patron Requests interface to the web client and addressed several bugfixes in that area. “It was great to see how something we wanted for a long time took shape and came together,” she said. 

Sylvia joined Scranton library in 2015, shortly after they migrated to Evergreen. As she became more proficient with Cataloging in Evergreen, she has been able to use that knowledge to train libraries joining the PaILS Consortium. She notes, “Migrations can be stressful – and I can ease their worries about the Cataloging side of the process.”

The PaILS Cataloging Committee has been working to educate Consortium members about Cataloging in Evergreen, including holding quarterly information meetings for Consortium members to learn or refresh knowledge about a particular process. Sylvia has also encouraged Catalogers to take the first steps to participate in Launchpad, by doing things like adding heat to bugs.

Sylvia is the first Cataloger to be nominated for Contributor of the Month, and she was thrilled to hear that. “This is awesome for me as a public librarian, because Catalogers are often overlooked,” she said. “I’m doubly honored [to be the first cataloger nominated] and hopefully the first of many.”

Sylvia has shared her knowledge directly with the larger community as well, presenting at both the 2018 and 2019 Evergreen International Conferences. “I really think that this is a great community, everyone is so approachable and eager to share. I love that about librarians – we are all super helpful. Librarians have this aura of helpfulness.”

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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.

Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that July’s Contributor of the Month is Jason Stephenson. Jason serves as the ILS Manager for C/W MARS in Massachusetts, and has been a key contributor to the Evergreen project over the years.

At C/W MARS, Jason maintains their Evergreen instance and its supporting infrastructure. Jason also provides independent consultation via his firm, Sigio. Jason’s experience as an Evergreen administrator informs his development work. “Since I have struggled with many of the same problems, I can sympathize with someone trying to run Evergreen for the first time,” he says.

Jason has an extensive history with Evergreen — when asked how long he has been participating with the community, Jason did a little digging and responded, “I have to admit that the answer surprised me … I sent my first email to the development mailing list in March of 2007 and began visiting the IRC channels in December of 2008.” This makes him one of the longest-running continuous participants in the project!

Jason has been active in Evergreen and OpenSRF development since 2011, and he was made an Evergreen core committer in 2012. Jason counts his two proudest code contributions to Evergreen as adding support for the SIP2 Fee Paid message, released in 2.2; and his work on Evergreen’s NCIPServer. 

Jason has authored over 320 commits for Evergreen which puts him at #13 on the all-time authors list and has authored several commits for OpenSRF as well, coming in at #9 on that all-time authors list. He is also very active in Launchpad where he has commented on close to 2,000 bugs over the years, and reported more than 200.

Jason can often be found in the #evergreen IRC channel under the handle Dyrcona, where he is well-known for offering his thoughts and answering questions from both experienced and new Evergreeners alike.

Jason encourages new community members to pop in to the IRC channel, and to participate in Launchpad. All users are welcome to add bug information. “If you can add a comment or even just click the link that the bug also affects your organization, that’s valuable information,” Jason says.

Anyone who’s attended a conference knows that sometimes the most valuable interactions occur outside of scheduled presentations, and the Evergreen conference is no different. Jason touts the annual conference, noting, “I find the social aspects of the conference to be the most rewarding, and I often learn more in informal chats with other users than I do in the formal sessions.”

Jason leaves us with this final thought on the community: “The Evergreen community is amazing! I participate on the periphery of a few other Free and Open Source software communities online, and the Evergreen community is one of the most friendly and welcoming among them. So, please, jump right in! The water’s warm, and there are no alligators in sight.”

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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.

Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.