From Voyager to Conifer Art Rhyno & Grace Liu Leddy Library University of Windsor October 8, 2009 NISO Forum – Library Resource Management Systems: New Challenges, New Opportunities The University of Windsors Experience

What is Conifer? Conifer is the joint project of Algoma, Laurentian, NOSM, and Windsor to adopt Evergreen as our common library system One union catalogue One shared set of servers One step towards greater cooperation among Ontario libraries for ILS functions

What is Conifer? From Google Map

University of Windsor Ontario: pop. 13million, home to about 1/3 of Canadians Windsor: southernmost city in Canada, 323,342 University of Windsor: 16,000 full-time students

Leddy Library Staff: 94 Systems staff: 6 Member of Ontario Council of University Libraries Strong commitments to Knowledge Ontario, the cross-sector partnership of 4500 library organizations in Ontario Legacy Voyager site >1million bib records

Arts trip to here … worked on a SPIRES-based ILS at Memorial University and wrote his first MARC editor joined Windsor, a beta partner in the development of Notis Horizon, one of the first client/server library systems scrambled when Ameritech pulled the plug on Notis initiative with less than 24 hours notice, scraped what was left of the budget to go back to the marketplace and became one of the first customers of Endeavor Voyager

Arts trip to here … 2005 highly problematic Voyager upgrade, IBM hardware costs squeeze budget, agree in strategic planning to look for new ILS options 2006 operational strategic plan targets one day symposium on the State of the ILS spent side hours developing java-based library system called PYTHEAS, some of the mappings ended up in Koha via work with a developer in BC, wrote his second MARC editor

The ILS Symposium - Nov. 15, 2006

PINES - a very big challenge for OSS solutions

A Shocking Slide from the ILS Symposium… PINES Cost Comparison

An ILS with a growing track record for consortia

An ILS also for academic libraries

OpenSRF and Evergreen

Achieving Agility its not about saving money (although we do save money) its not about doing what we already do with OSS tools (although we still have to do a lot of the same things) its not about creating another consortium for finding common work flows (although it is happening) its about agility and flexibility on an increasingly networked planet (and we cant afford to stumble right now)

UW and Conifer 2007 Officially join forces with Evergreen, work with Evergreen coders on beginnings of acq/ser layer, participate in a "meeting of the interested" university libraries in Guelph, Project Conifer is born! 2008 Establish test server environment, start mapping out priorities 2009 Go live on May 4th

The New OPAC

OPAC Customizations P. Zimmerman, 2009

Workflow Modifications Lack of Serials/Acquisitions/Reserves modules provided (demanded) a modified workflow. All solutions aren't necessarily code! Grant Johnson, UPEI, 2009

Integrating with SFX

Uniting All Formats of Holdings in SFX

Links Conifer UW OPAC: CA/skin/uwin/xml/ Conifer Discuss Group: Evergreen Wiki: Equinox:

Thank you! Contact: Art Rhyno: Grace Liu: