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Evergreen by Georgia Public Libraries by C0L0PH0N · 2012-01-04 23:04 · Score: 5, Informative · on Ask Slashdot: Tech For Small Library Automation?

The "Evergreen" library system is free and open source, and was initiated by the Georgia Public Library System in 2006, and is currently in use by over 850 libraries, including a "parish" library. You can check it out here: http://open-ils.org/about.php. The site also has a link to a showcase of libraries already running, and on the Internet. The "client" runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. I think the server runs on Linux.

Evergreen by Anonymous Coward · 2011-11-16 08:37 · Score: 0 · on Ask Slashdot: Statistical Analysis Packages For Libraries?

Perhaps collecting the data in a standard open source software system would be a helpful first step? http://open-ils.org/

Vendor lock-in vs. good customer service by DenialS · 2006-12-24 02:47 · Score: 3, Informative · on Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS

I'm a systems librarian, so I claim to know of what I speak.

Most of it shouldn't even need to be converted. It should be in MARC Bibliographic format, which is generally fairly easy to transfer between databases.

This is true, as far as the bibliographic information goes. There are lots of open-source packages for working with MARC records, like pymarc (Python) or File_MARC (PHP). But the rest of the system is proprietary: holdings records, (which copies do you hold, in which locations, and where is that copy currently - loaned out, lost, on reserve, etc), circulation records, user records, acquisitions records. Sure, it's all just a database schema mapping exercise, if your vendor's license allows you to touch that data directly. Sadly, the past generation of libraries seems to have accepted vendor lock-in as a matter of course; a mistake that we're paying for now and which led directly to the development of Evergreen.

But really, let's be realistic. The major OPAC package is Voyager, which runs on top of Oracle, so runs on anything that runs Oracle. Libraries that don't have Voyager are pretty much all just wishing they could afford it (and the Oracle licenses).

Wow. This is just so wrong that I don't know where to begin. First, Voyager is far from the market leader (in either usable interfaces or in market share). See Second, the underlying database doesn't mean a thing if you aren't given the APIs to actually modify or extend your primary application, unless you're willing to reimplement the entire application -- in which case, why bother paying for a library system in the first place. And in most cases, when the vendor has made an API available, you have to pay extra fee per potential developer to receive the documentation and to be eligible for paid support for their API (which, of course, is an additional support fee over and above your standard support fees). Third, most librarians I know couldn't care less about what technology their system is built on. They're focused on providing the best possible service to their users. Over the past few years, the library community has started to realize that there are some pretty cool Web interfaces out there in the wild that their vendors aren't providing for us. So we've been going through exercises like NCSU's use of Endeca (on the proprietary side) and Koha, Evergreen, and WPopac (on the open-source side) to try and correct the situation. Librarians rock, you know.

Re:Evergreen? Doesn't compute by DenialS · 2006-12-24 02:04 · Score: 1 · on Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS

Umm, dude -- you need to ask for help in the right forum. There are a few of us trying to nail down the installation instructions right now.

Re:packaging? by DenialS · 2006-12-24 02:01 · Score: 1 · on Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS

It's a lot more complex than just running rpm against a tarball. This application depends on Apache, PostgreSQL, a Jabber server, libmemcached, CVS versions of SpiderMonkey and the lib-dbi / lib-dbd packages, and a host of Perl modules. Georgia's installation runs on top of 25 servers. Getting a secure, stable system up and running was understandably the Evergreen team's first priority; making the source and as much documentation available as they already have was a courtesy that they didn't even have to extend. However, they've gone further than that: they have made a commitment to open source, and librarians-who-do-development / developers-for-libraries thank them for that!

The project is still in its infancy as far as growing outside of Georgia. That's why a few of us are starting by trying to build Open-ILS (aka Evergreen) on our own, following the existing installation instructions. We've already been able to tease out a few more details in the process of trying to create distribution-specific instructions... not that the developers are trying to keep installation hard, it's just that they've lived and breathed this for the last year and a half and so some details are second-nature to them.

I have been quite impressed with the Evergreen team's technical capabilities and commitment to open source. They have contributed patches to the upstream libdbi and libdbd packages as a matter of course, and they pull in a ton of Perl modules that are either not packaged in most distributions, or on which they have dependencies on newer versions than are available in current distros. The team is committed to a transparent open source model comparable to the Linux or PostgreSQL development models and have posted a first draft of that model for comment.

So, the first hurdle is to set up an Evergreen environment outside of Georgia. I've come very close with Ubuntu and Gentoo, but have one more hurdle to clear. All the way along, the developers have been extremely responsive to my questions.

Once we nail down the "gotchas", my personal goal is to create a VMWare image that can be easily redistributed for demonstration purposes. I agree that packaging is obviously going to be an important aspect of the project, but it naturally has to follow a well-documented manual install process.

Evergreen is going to spread outside of Georgia, and it's going to spread fast. The University of Windsor has already announced their intention to work with Evergreen to build an acquisitions system.