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Mary Llewellyn: Evergreen Contributor of the Month

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that May’s Contributor of the Month is Mary Llewellyn, the Database Manager at Bibliomation, a consortium of Evergreen libraries in Connecticut. Mary’s role at Bibliomation includes supporting Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Serials workflows for their member libraries.

Mary can often be found asking questions and sharing her knowledge on various Evergreen community listservs. “I like to go to the community to compare notes before I go file a bug — the listserv is a great point of entry, since there are others who may have the same issue,” Mary tells us. Since she works so closely with Cataloging, Serials, and Acquisitions, Mary is always willing to answer others’ questions in these areas.

Mary is also active in Launchpad, where she has reported 21 bugs and commented on 38 bugs.

As part of her job at Bibliomation Mary writes SQL queries to perform quality assurance & record checks, and she is always willing to share these queries with fellow Evergreen libraries. Some of the work she does with her queries include identifying vendor-level records to flag for upgraded cataloging, checking that records have a valid OCLC Title Control Number, looking for empty bib records, and finding old Acquisitions records that need to be removed or upgraded.

Mary notes that this kind of work is much easier to perform in an open source system, since they have access to system level data and can manipulate that data. “Listening at some of our meetings [with non-Evergreen libraries], it’s clear that not everyone has that door open for them,” she says. “I know how much friction that can add when you have to go through an intermediary.”

Bibliomation’s first libraries went live on Evergreen in 2010, and that’s when Mary started going to interest group meetings and communicating on the listservs. Mary has been to every Evergreen Conference since 2010’s Grand Rapids conference. “I’ve met great people at the Conferences,” Mary says. “The longer you’re in it, the better you can mesh in the community and the better you can improve your own organization and the community as a whole.”

Mary’s advice for newcomers is straightforward. “I would start by joining the listservs. Ask questions, and give others the opportunity to help you. That strengthens the bond, and someday you can return the favor!”

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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.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Library Automation Software

What’s on my mind today? I’ll tell you: it’s the War against Evergreen.

What’s that Jason? Surely you’re kidding?

No, I’m not.

Another title could be Open Source vs. the Used Car Salesmen. We’ve seen this before with Linux vs. Windows; but I’ve never expected to experience such a thing first hand. It really upsets me. We’re passionate about our software, we’re a meritocracy with development, but we get distracted by people coming to us after having been fed with misinformation. We’ll pit technology vs technology any day (and win or lose, we adapt and ultimately win), but should we really have to deal with Jedi mind tricks?

The war started internally when Evergreen was just an idea. We had to fight for it. We won that battle; but then came the Sith. 🙂

One prominent incident happened about 2 years ago, while Evergreen was in heavy development, when a non-US library consortium contacted us and told us what a particular vendor was telling them:

  1. That we were having problems with development and were running behind schedule (*cough* we were ahead of schedule *cough*)
  2. That one of our biggest problems was that we would always be a step behind their company/product (stair climbing the Tower of Babel for kicks and giggles? some folks are playing catch-up to us and pretending otherwise!)
  3. That “open source development would lead us down a path to disaster, leading to a third-rate, third-world system” (riiiight…)

What was up with that? Evergreen wasn’t even in Alpha yet and a vendor was worried about us enough to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, commonly known as FUD. Did they skip the part where they were supposed to ignore us? We confronted the vendor and they denied everything. 🙂

More recently, a vendor told a client that Evergreen can’t do holds. Um. What? That’s one of the main features in use by PINES… heck, it’s one of the main purposes of PINES: the sharing of materials amongst libraries. Evergreen, in fact, has a better holds system than the vendor in question: our hold targeting is randomized when selecting materials at certain geographic ranges (say, statewide), instead of simply selecting the last copy added to the database. What a novel idea!

Here’s some Evergreen FUD related to databases:

  • Evergreen really uses MySQL and not Postgres
  • Relational databases can’t handle MARC, and thus Evergreen does not support MARC
  • Evergreen can’t handle formats besides MARC
  • Evergreen can’t search the entire MARC record, only subsets of it

All false (and some even contradictory!). Evergreen uses Postgres in a replicated environment, can handle all sorts of bibliographic formats, can maintain a fulltext index on any of them in their entirety and in subsets. I’m not sure that all of these were started maliciously, but at least some of it originated from people who should know better *wags finger*.

Here’s another place brimming with FUD. One particularly good bit:

  • Evergreen isn’t really “open”, “grass roots”, or they.. uhhh.. don’t play nice

I suspect this is coming more from a Koha vs. Evergreen angle, because certainly none of the proprietary vendors are open by any open source definition. Evergreen, and I assume Koha, were open source from the very beginning, with the primary hope of becoming sustainable through a community of volunteers. I believe Koha has succeeded with this goal, and I believe Evergreen is succeeding with it (our community really started forming after Evergreen proved itself with PINES). However, no two open source projects are exactly alike, and there are wide variations in how gift cultures and meritocracies organize and manage themselves. The ground rules the original developers try to model are the same as the Postgres project. We humbly await your patch, and that includes patches to our culture and community, because we are what you make us.

Here’s more on a blog post:

  • used by 1 library system (a little disingenuous to compare 1 system to 500 libraries, when that 1 system is composed of 265 libraries)
  • designed for top-down control, ie. a single decision is made by the administrators for the entire system (that’s the situation we jumped ship from)

I guess it’s a matter of perspective. The proprietary vendors have thousands of installations, but are people really happy with them? As for top-down control, it’s more like control at whatever point in an organization hierarchy it makes sense to, and that’s regardless of whether we’re talking about statistical codes for patrons, statistical codes for items, surveys, shelving locations, call numbers, templates, or what have you. If we’re missing something, it’s easy to address, because the infrastructure is sound. If anything, you can say Evergreen was designed with a public library bias, yet we’re discovering that adding academic features is easy. If there’s something you want to see, let us know!

Here’s some more FUD from an email we happened to come across:

  • Evergreen is only useful for huge installations
  • It’s too complicated for all but the biggest libraries to deploy

I find this very amusing. We have “individuals” in our “non-open” community deploying test environments of Evergreen, and creating vmware images to share with others that make the process even easier. We have vendors willing to do it for you. And it’s only complicated where it needs to be! 😀

Remember, Evergreen was intended to be open source from the project’s very inception, so the intent was always that other libraries would use it. Wherever possible, we abstracted and made things flexible. One of our mantras is that software should not dictate policy, and since policy is prone to change, the software must be easily adaptable. We even hired developers from outside the library industry to give us a different perspective. We weren’t perfect; there’s domain knowledge that we lack (and that the community is addressing), but the foundation we built is solid. Hopefully I won’t feel the need to say more on this topic, and I admit to being a bit exasperated. Please forgive me if you made it this far. 🙂

I guess the best sanity check for possible misinformation is for people to come straight to the source–code and community. We’re here, we’re in #openils-evergreen on freenode IRC, and we’re on the OPEN-ILS-GENERAL and OPEN-ILS-DEV mailing lists (http://open-ils.org/listserv.html).

Thanks for everything folks!

— Jason

Evergreen Community Spotlight: Tiffany Little

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that May’s Community Spotlight is Tiffany Little, of Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS). Tiffany is the PINES Services Specialist for Acquisitions, and in that role has become very involved with the larger Evergreen community.

Tiffany’s first experiences with Evergreen were while she was working as a PINES librarian. Her background is primarily cataloging but her experience also covered circulation, administration, and tech: “Pretty much everything except children’s services!” Tiffany notes. “Because I had such a broad range of experience, I like to see everything in the community.”  

Tiffany’s community involvement began in 2017 when she was hired by PINES to facilitate broader use of Acquisitions in the consortium. She almost immediately was asked to join the Evergreen Community Development Initiative (then MassLNC) Development Committee as a workflow specialist.

In the years since, Tiffany’s community involvement has grown significantly. She revived the community Acquisitions Interest Group, and currently serves as its coordinator. She also was on the Conference Committee for the 2020 Evergreen International Conference and is a current member of The Evergreen Project Board.

In addition, Tiffany is a regular participant in community Bug Squashing Weeks, and is a member of the Bug Wranglers Team. Tiffany has commented on 443 bugs in Launchpad, as well as filed 49 bugs, and has contributed two patches to the Evergreen codebase.

Tiffany’s coding knowledge is primarily self taught, and she describes a path that is accessible to many who may not think of themselves as coders. Back in her library days, she began creating formulas for spreadsheets – and then when formulas got too complicated, she taught herself VBA to automate even more spreadsheet functions. “VBA taught me the idea of what coding is – input, do a thing in a certain order, output,” Tiffany says. “So when I wanted to do a patch, I did a similar thing – I looked in the file until I found something that looked like it was what I wanted, and tinkered until it worked.” 

Tiffany’s advice to new community members is to lurk, especially if you’re intimidated at first. “When you start to lurk in the listserv and IRC, you realize that it’s just a roomful of people – and not that many people – and they become less intimidating.” As you get to know community members, she says, you learn to associate IRC handles with real people and build those relationships – however, make sure you are making connections: “Don’t lurk forever!”

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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.