State of the Open ILS Dan Scott OLA SuperConference Friday, February 1, 2008

Launch ● On September 5th, 2006, Evergreen went live in Georgia PINES with: ● Online catalogue ● Patron self-service ● Cataloging ● Circulation ● Report ● 252 libraries, 8 million items, 1 system

Community

Why is Laurentian going green? ● Our current ILS does not meet our needs: ● 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” ● We have to migrate to new hardware anyway ● Our systems librarian is a developer ● We are not alone...

Project Conifer ● Consortial installation of Evergreen for academics (Laurentian, McMaster, and Windsor) – rough plan: ● Deploy test cluster (5 beefy servers) ● Install, configure, start loading data ● Test and improve ● Usability – collect feedback, improve, and iterate ● 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 ● “Evergreen makes the same mistakes as traditional ILSes; what we need is a loosely coupled system built on a service oriented architecture (SOA)” ● 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 ● “Evergreen is great for public library consortiums with hundreds of branches, but doesn't scale down.” ● Tell that to Carson Area – Crystal City Schools (who run Evergreen for their high school libraries)! ● My own experiences: ● 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 ● “Evergreen forces a top-down hierarchy on the libraries in a consortial implementation.” ● 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 ● “Evergreen is too hard to install.” ● 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 ● “We don't have the skills to support this ourselves.” ● 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 ● Built-in Z39.50 client with support for searching multiple sources ● MARC editor with contextual help, support for templates, validation ● Rudimentary authorities support ● 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? ● Started by trying to integrate Apache OFBiz ● We learned a lot, but OFBiz is HUGE ● Opted to build what we need for fast iterations ● Rapid progress in January: ● OpenSRF plumbing for budgets, funds, picklists ● Web interface built on Pylons ● EDI capabilities to be provided by BOTS ● Target: a complete “buy a book” acquisitions scenario by the end of February

Tell me about serials ● Financial parts of serials are being built along with acquisitions ● Plan for serials patterns - overlay one or more basic calendar schedules, with exceptions ● 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? ● No academic reserves functionality yet ● Basic design for academic reserves: ● 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 ● Wiki ● Mailing lists ● The Book of Evergreen

Are we there yet? ● We're working on all of this; it's being built one line of code at a time ● 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! ● If you don't have the skills in-house to set up and configure Evergreen, commercial support is an option for: ● Installing and configuring ● Migration ● Training ● Support ● Custom development ● Complete hosted system

How do I get started? ● Get on the mailing lists and the IRC channel ● Please send us your acquisitions workflows (who does what and why) - requesting, selecting, approving, ordering, receiving, rolling over, and anything else... ● Play with the demo site ( ● 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? ● When we're out of time, let's go for coffee.

References ● Evergreen project: ● Project Conifer: ● My blog: ● The Evergreen logo is a trademark of Georgia Public Library Service.

License This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.