Transcript www.coffeecode.net

State of the Open ILS
Dan Scott
OLA SuperConference
Friday, February 1, 2008
Launch
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On September 5th, 2006, Evergreen went live in
Georgia PINES with:
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Online catalogue
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Patron self-service
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Cataloging
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Circulation
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Report
252 libraries, 8 million items, 1 system
Community
Why is Laurentian going green?
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Our current ILS does not meet our needs:
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Upgrading to the current supported version broke our
bilingual notices
Most investments in customizing our ILS would be
thrown away if we move to a new discovery layer or
system – “API lock-in”
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We have to migrate to new hardware anyway
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Our systems librarian is a developer
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We are not alone...
Project Conifer
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Consortial installation of Evergreen for academics
(Laurentian, McMaster, and Windsor) – rough plan:
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Deploy test cluster (5 beefy servers)
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Install, configure, start loading data
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Test and improve
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Usability – collect feedback, improve, and iterate
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Performance and load
Expected benefits include new services, cost
sharing, interoperability, and skills development
Let's get the ugly stuff out of the way
Myths and misinformation
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“Evergreen makes the same mistakes as traditional
ILSes; what we need is a loosely coupled system
built on a service oriented architecture (SOA)”
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The heart of Evergreen is the Open Service Request
Framework (OpenSRF) – an SOA that uses JSON over
XMPP server as the service bus and Perl, C, Java, and
Python* as service method implementation languages
Evergreen currently looks like a traditional ILS because
all of the underlying components are surfaced to the user
in a unified interface (staff client or catalog)
Myths and misinformation
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“Evergreen is great for public library consortiums
with hundreds of branches, but doesn't scale down.”
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Tell that to Carson Area – Crystal City Schools (who run
Evergreen for their high school libraries)!
My own experiences:
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I develop and test Evergreen on my laptop (1.5 GB RAM) –
currently loaded with 50,000 records
I build and distribute Evergreen in VMWare images that run
happily in 512 MB of RAM
Myths and misinformation
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“Evergreen forces a top-down hierarchy on the
libraries in a consortial implementation.”
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While its administrative model does support a
hierarchical structure, you can create a flat hierarchy with
an unlimited number of top-level members of that
hierarchy
Each member can have its own policies, its own
catalogue branding regardless of hierarchy
Myths and misinformation
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“Evergreen is too hard to install.”
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How many times have you installed your current ILS?
Evergreen does have a lot of system dependencies, but
install scripts for Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo now do
most of the work for you.
I'll be giving an Evergreen install and customization
session at Code4Lib 2008 during a 2.5 hour time slot
Myths and misinformation
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“We don't have the skills to support this ourselves.”
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Nothing forces you to support Evergreen yourself; if you
have an ILS today, you probably don't support that
yourself
You can buy a support contract for Evergreen - and there
are actually multiple businesses competing for your
Evergreen support dollars!
So what does Evergreen have today?
Part 1: Patron interface
Discovery interface
Discovery: spell check
Discovery: results
Discovery: detailed record
Discovery: shelf browser
Socializing: Book bags
Book bags: RSS
Patron self-service
So what does Evergreen have today?
Part 2: Staff Client
Circulation
Patron interface
Cataloging features
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Built-in Z39.50 client with support for searching
multiple sources
MARC editor with contextual help, support for
templates, validation
Rudimentary authorities support
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Can load authorities, but can't define them on the fly
'Bucket' support for performing bulk operations on
records and items
Z39.50 client
MARC editor
Buckets: merging records
Reporting interface
So what's in the works?
What about acquisitions?
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Started by trying to integrate Apache OFBiz
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We learned a lot, but OFBiz is HUGE
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Opted to build what we need for fast iterations
Rapid progress in January:
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OpenSRF plumbing for budgets, funds, picklists
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Web interface built on Pylons
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EDI capabilities to be provided by BOTS
Target: a complete “buy a book” acquisitions
scenario by the end of February
Tell me about serials
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Financial parts of serials are being built along with
acquisitions
Plan for serials patterns - overlay one or more basic
calendar schedules, with exceptions
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Example: 13 issues a year = 1 monthly + 1 annual
Example: 364 issues a year = 1 daily – 1 annual
exception
Want to support easy check-ins, even though print
subscriptions are declining – inspired by Kardex?
Academic reserves?
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No academic reserves functionality yet
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Basic design for academic reserves:
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Reserve item will be added to a class “bucket”
A class bucket will map to one or more instructors, a
class name, and a class code
A class bucket will override its reserve items' location
and circulation policy
Eventually we would like to integrate with course
management software
Documentation
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Wiki
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Mailing lists
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The Book of Evergreen
Are we there yet?
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We're working on all of this; it's being built one line
of code at a time
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Advocacy work and day-to-day business operations has
slowed down the pace of development for core team
My time is split between project management and
development – oh yeah, and my ongoing hardware &
software & collection development responsibilities
More dedicated skilled resources could propel this
project ahead (welcome back, David Fiander!)
But we're a geek-free zone!
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If you don't have the skills in-house to set up and
configure Evergreen, commercial support is an
option for:
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Installing and configuring
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Migration
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Training
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Support
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Custom development
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Complete hosted system
How do I get started?
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Get on the mailing lists and the IRC channel
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Play with the demo site (http://demo.gapines.org)
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Please send us your acquisitions workflows (who does
what and why) - requesting, selecting, approving,
ordering, receiving, rolling over, and anything else...
Both the OPAC and the Staff Client
Try out one of our VMWare images (you can run
Linux on Windows!)
Read up on the wiki
Questions?
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When we're out of time, let's go for coffee.
References
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Evergreen project: http://open-ils.org/
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Project Conifer: http://conifer.mcmaster.ca/
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My blog: http://coffeecode.net
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The Evergreen logo is a trademark of Georgia Public
Library Service.
License
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