The largest happening lately in PINES-Evergreen land is a little place called e^deltacom. We issued an RFP for server hosting (aka “colocation”) services a while back, and e^deltacom was recently awarded the contract. Our intent in obtaining the services of such a place is to ensure that the PINES system has the best possible chance of staying operational, stable, and physically secure at all times. To say the hosting facility is impressive is an understatement. The following is some information I pulled off their website and some materials we were provided in the RFP process:
Evergreen at 5
Happy Birthday, Evergreen!
Tuesday, September 6, was the beginning of Evergreen’s sixth year. (Evergreen’s anniversary is calculated as the day after the U.S. Labor Day in early September. The PINES library consortium was the first implementation of Evergreen and it went live on that day in 2006.) What follows are summary tables of libraries migrating to Evergreen over those years. They provide quiet testimony to the growth of Evergreen and hint at the rich community which has formed around it.
For those new to Evergreen, there is not yet an organized history of Evergreen but there are a number of available sources of information. A good start to those sources with links is available in the Evergreen entry in the Open Source ILS Glossary.
EG@0 | EG@1 | EG@2 | EG@3 | EG@4 | EG@5 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Systems | 45 | 48 | 64 | 159 | 247 | 521 |
Outlets | 239 | 253 | 285 | 427 | 609 | 1,006 |
A few observations.
- Note that the Evergreen community welcomed its 1,000th library when the Buncombe County Public Libraries joined the NC Cardinal system. Asheville, North Carolina is the county seat of Buncombe County. There are 13 branches in the system.
- And we have a winner in our contest to guess the date for the migration of the 1,000th library. It appears that Anoop Atre had the closest guess for that date. He guessed the migration of the 1,000th library would be on August 31, 2011 just missing the threshold migration date of September 2, 2011.
- Sitka was the first consortium outside of Georgia to migrate libraries to Evergreen when it migrated the Prince Rupert Library in Prince Rupert, British Columbia in November, 2007. Sitka just added its 50th system, the Beaver Valley Public Library in Fruitvale, BC. Make sure to click on the link and see the best library picture you will see in a long time: "Literacy begins early." Indeed.
- It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that can certainly be said of the Evergreen community. Evergreen Indiana celebrated its third birthday on August 25th. In those three short years, Evergreen Indiana has grown to 90 library systems with 130 separate outlets. In addition to its public library members, it has added two K12 libraries.
- There were several large migrations in this 5th year. It appears that the largest single migration was one that took place in June when 50 library systems in Bibliomation joined BibliOak. BibliOak has had several separate migrations in the process of constructing its multi-type library network in Connecticut. Merrimack Valley Library Consortium migrated 35 public library systems to Evergreen.
EG@0 | EG@1 | EG@2 | EG@3 | EG@4 | EG@5 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Public | 44 | 47 | 62 | 126 | 202 | 430 |
Academic | 0 | 0 | 1 | 10 | 13 | 27 |
K12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 27 |
State Libraries | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Special Libraries | 0 | 0 | 0 | 20 | 26 | 36 |
Systems | 45 | 48 | 64 | 159 | 247 | 521 |
Public libraries are still the predominate type of library running Evergreen but note the change in K12 libraries. In fact, the first migrations of Evergreen’s Year 6 resulted in 17 more K12 libraries being added to Bibliomation’s BibliOak consortium—these libraries are not included in the totals in this table. They would have migrated earlier but for the fact that Hurricane Irene decided to pay a visit to Connecticut resulting in power failures and the closure of schools.
EG@0 | EG@1 | EG@2 | EG@3 | EG@4 | EG@5 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Consortia | 1 | 1 | 4 | 10 | 13 | 20 |
Independent systems | 0 | 0 | 3 | 7 | 14 | 18 |
States/provinces with Evergreen Libraries |
1 | 1 | 7 | 16 | 22 | 30 |
In the last year, seven consortia have joined the Evergreen community:
- The Maine Balsam Library Consortium
- OWWL a project of the Pioneer Library System in New York
- The Sage Library System of Eastern Oregon
- Skagit Evergreen Libraries in Skagit County, Washington
- Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC) the first of the Massachusetts systems to migrate to Evergreen.
- And NC Cardinal—a project of the North Carolina State Library—and our newest.
- Libraries in the Republic of Georgia also migrated to Evergreen. These were the first libraries outside of North America that run Evergreen and have a public OPAC visible the Web.
All indications are that this next year will continue to see rapid growth in the number and breadth of Evergreen libraries. We can also expect to see Evergreen libraries in at least three European countries where work on implementations is ongoing.
Bob Molyneux
Every reader his or her book; Every book its reader.
Lorcan Dempsey’s post Evergreen and Pines refers to a Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) report Use of Georgia’s public libraries continues to rise in Internet Age and echoes one I made earlier here entitled Save the time of the reader. Briefly, all three deal with increases in the use of Georgia Public libraries generally and PINES particularly. But Dempsey makes a point of mentioning the consortial aspect of PINES and I have been thinking about this very point since my post a few weeks ago.
PINES, of course, runs on Evergreen and although Evergreen is running individual systems, the fact is that Evergreen is the most consortially-aware ILS—open source or proprietary—has resulted in some fascinating dynamics which these cited posts allude to.
In my post, Save the time of the reader, I reported on my attempt to measure the change year over year in three PINES use measures that could be compared before and after the switch from the legacy vendor to Evergreen. There are dramatic increases which I attributed largely to Ranganathan’s law it referred to because the reader’s time was saved as a result of better design of the interface, particularly of holds.
However, there is a measurement problem that brings out something more important that had implications I didn’t understand a month ago. Not all public libraries in Georgia are in PINES and the number changed over the period of my analysis. If we want apples to apples, as the saying goes, we should analytically remove the libraries that were added during the year so that we would have circs, holds, and such at the same set of libraries, that is, so that increases reported are not because of the addition of new libraries but rather because of easier to use software with better features. People, though, are just a bit complicated and that simple statistical manipulation would miss something key.
Georgia has a universal borrower card so if your local library is not in PINES, you can go to one that is and borrow from the PINES system. And what library users are doing is pretty clear, they are making the drive: they want access to the 2 million bibliographic entities and the over 9 million items owned by the libraries in PINES. As a result, the obvious statistical treatment itself would miss this dynamic aspect of people’s behavior. They don’t hold still and they react to changes in their environment.
To come full circle, I offer this speculation: that some of the growth in the number of PINES systems (44 to 49) since Evergreen went live in 2006, may be a result of this behavior.
I was graduated from library school in 1971 and I have seen various fashions about how best to do library service: big regionals or small local and intimate libraries. Back and forth. Back and forth. I believe the jury is now in. Library users are voting with their feet; they want the big, resource rich library.
Chris Jowaisis’s Texas Library Systems wiki has an ILS Discussion in which he offered an opinion I thought insightful about the Georgia experience: “(CJ opinion) political agreements are as impressive as the technology achievements of Evergreen.” I have quoted Chris’s observation often. Now, after seeing the experience in Georgia up close, I think that while we librarians and politicians care about the politics, the people who use libraries don’t. If you build the resource sharing consortium, they will come.
Bob Molyneux