Slashdot Mirror
Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS
Systems Librarian writes "Linux.com is running a story entitled 'Librarians stake their future on open source'. It details a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service that have developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run. The system is Evergreen. The element of this project that has the participants especially excited is the speed. Previously, if users wanted changes to their systems, they'd be put into an 'enhancement queue'. Now, some features are implemented overnight. From the article: 'In fact, the catalog has many features and innovations that are lacking in non-free systems. It does on-the-fly spellcheck and gives search suggestions and adds additional content, such as book covers, reviews, and excerpts. The Shelf Browser shows items ordered along a virtual shelf built out of the holdings of the entire system. Patrons can create bookbags, which are lists that contain a selected collection of annotated titles. Bookbags can be kept private or shared as a regular Web page or as Atom or RSS feeds.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Well, of course a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service like open source!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The virtual shelf feature sounds great to me. There's nothing quite like finding the section of the library devoted to the topic you are interested in and browsing through the books. That experience is hard to duplicate on the electronic systems I've used. Now if they'd just add the content online....
They didn't. They hired a couple of developers who have been working on building this system for several years now.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Evergreen is available online, have a look yourself: here
(system seems a little slow already, hopefully this doesn't slashdot it).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured. For some reason my local library uses Internet explorer and not Firefox on their computers designated for web access only. It's almost enough for me to try to get elected to the library district.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I thought that these were interesting items in their FAQ:
6. What license is this software going to be released under?
We are releasing this software under the GPL.
8. What core technologies are you utilizing?
* Database: Postgresql
* Logic/glue languages: C and Perl
* Webserver: Apache, mod_perl
* Server operating system: Linux
* Server hardware: x86-64
* Messaging core: Jabber
* Client side software: XUL
I was especially happily surprised to see jabber there. I have long thought that jabber is vastly underrated and under-used.
The entire FAQ is at:
http://www.open-ils.org/faq.html
I'm a college student and have been working part-time at a local library for the past few years to pay the bills.
:(
Our library consortium uses something called Polaris, by Gaylord Information Systems. It's among the worst pieces of software I have ever had the opportunity to use, and it is completely proprietary and Windows based. It's a pain in the ass to get anything done, and is missing several key features (such as customizable reports) that would make our lives much easier. Coming from a company called "Gaylord" what can we expect, eh?
Hopefully Evergreen gains enough steam to get our consortium to at least consider it, however considering that most of the IT people employed by the consortium can't even figure out how to manage Windows servers it's likely they'll opt for something easer for them to administrate.
The future of libraries (brick and mortal at least) is about as bright as most open source software.
Well, both look better than the future of your slashdot trolling career if that's the best you can do.
Seeing its almost impossible for online libraries to legally lend ebooks, I don't see brick & mortar libraries going anywhere anytime soon. As GPL (and other Open Source) software is vital to almost all aspects of the software industry, OSS isn't going anywhere either.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
These seems to me to be the perfect way for Open Source to make rapid progress and gain further acceptance. By targetting key industries that are only served by expensive software packages that are poorly supported or require expensive support contracts, Open Source can provide a obvious and undeniable cost and quality improvement over closed source software. This is doubly so for industries where the needs are well understood. In addition to library management software, I would suggest that class scheduling and enrollment/registration software might be another area. Universities and schools pay millions for this software, and it's usually pretty primative stuff. Inventory management and cash register software might be another area.
Successful projects need to be well-packaged in order to succeed,
I think a project this size is going to need someone competent enough to untar a tarball to run things. Packaging isn't as big a deal for complex server software as it is for desktop or commodity server software.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
For the eighty billionth time, MySQL runs and will continue to run fine on every distro, you just can't buy enterprise support from MySQL AB unless you are using Red Hat or SuSE .
[insert witty comment here]
Also check out Koha, which is going to be launched at the Meadville Public Library in PA early next year, and has been in place in a few libraries throughout the world. It runs natively on Linux... I've gotten it to run on my home box (I am currently doing archives work for a local organization) and I think it holds its own against Horizon, III, Aleph and the big boys of integrated library systems.
I wanted to try out Open-ILS/Evergreen, but had some issues getting it to run. Granted, I didn't try as hard as I did with Koha.
In terms of Linux in libraries, there are a few devoted people (and the numbers are growing) pushing for it. I swear, it can not be beat in the public computing arena.
An open ILS just makes sense. It is easily customized, cheaper in the long run, and really, all the ILS software is served through web pages now anyway. Why are libraries spending up to $10,000 a seat for this stuff? It's the learning curve. And FUD.
This librarian can program, although it was never a passion. Her father, OTOH is the famous engineer/programmer and infamous manager Tom West. She is also a free speech activist who devised a Patriot Act FBI visit alert system for libraries.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Libraries have had computerised inventory systems allowing people to check books in and out for an extremely long time. But they always use technology to fill a need. They don;t go overboard, and aren't fooled by hype from well dressed marketing people. They see technology as a tool and don't expect it to do more than it is designed to do. As a result, they tend to be pretty succesful.
Other government departments seem to do the exact opposite.
Perhaps we should get the nations librarians to run government IT departments.
I've been following this and other OSS ILS projects like Koha on and off for a while. I was working at City College of San Francisco on the student ID barcode project. That was mostly being driven by the CCSF Library. They hated the long lines every semester when students lined up to get their barcodes manually affixed to their ID cards so they could use the PCs in the library to check email and the like. My boss and I developed a way for the SCT Banner system to produce barcodes directly on student IDs.
In the process, my boss and I were made aware that the Library was planning to dump their ancient Dynix ILS and switch to a new one. I tried making a case that they would be better off spending the $100,000 budgeted for the new system on developing an OSS one (paying me to do it, of course!) which would give them more control over the result. So I researched a lot of the OSS ILS projects going on. Evergreen seemed very promising.
The CCSF Library ended up going with a proprietary system - and guess what? They got screwed at least partially. The company promised to integrate the library checkout counter portion of the system with the SCT Banner student database that CCSF uses. This was a requirement and the library put it in the contract. And sure enough, as soon as the money changed hands, the company reneged on the requirement (because integrating anything with Banner is not a trivial task). Some personnel from the CCSF ITS department had to devote considerable time to providing a work-around.
So I'm glad Georgia managed to get Evergreen out and it seems to be working well, at least from the initial reports. They also managed to get it working fairly quickly as large OSS projects go. I think they were only at it for a couple years. And ILS's are not trivial projects. There are library industry technical standards that have to be adhered to and the end user usability issues are enormous. The acquisitions side tends to be complex (especially on the magazine subscription side), and the MARC record standard is not a simple thing to translate into a relational database schema.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured.
This is irrelevant. There WAS no free, more secure, or full featured solution for library management.
Nevermind that most of the cost, at least initially and for the first few years, is NOT the software. About a decade ago when my school went to a computerized system, the cost was mostly in labor.
I don't recall how they managed to link barcodes to books; whether each book was pre-assigned a specific barcode, or barcodes were applied and the system brought into sync via hand entry.
This process took MONTHS and the work of several librarians and the expensive data-entry company.
I can imagine scenarios where you could get 2 dozen volunteers and go shelf by shelf through a library and catalog the collection, but it'd still be a massive undertaking, even for a small library such as one in a high school.
Your only hope is aggressive use of laptops on wireless with barcode scanners, and an ISBN lookup database you can pull, quickly verify the basics, and toss the book on the shelf again (in the proper order.)
Please help metamoderate.
My library was well stocked with those (they had K&R as well. Thank God for timeless classics). Then one day Knuth suddenly appeared on the shelves.
When I inquired who the new computer savvy guy was they wondered how I could tell, but yes, there was a new guy and yes, he seemed to know something about these computer thingies so they were having him spiff up the section a bit.
So far he seems to be doing a fine job of not only cleaning out the dross but buying exactly the right titles to replace them. I wonder if he reads Slashdot.
KFG
That must have been uncomfortable for him....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
My wife (a retired library science professor) wanted to do this 25 years ago. No one was interested.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
they were going to run everything on top of Ubuntu until it was discovered that a certain M. Shuttleworth did not return that copy of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" back in '89. If only he'd of used that $20 million to pay that stupid book fine instead of a weeks vacation in space!
load "$",8,1
for quite some time, i've been looking for a open source or cheap low-end library management system for my church's small library. something that would let people create an account, log in and then check out books themselves. (there's no librarian sitting there) Then, send them email reminders when a book is due. Other cool things would be: browse the collection on the library computer or online; if a book is checked out, you can send a message to whoever has it; reserve books online; book data input from Amazon or other sources. The dream solution would be if people could enter their own book/video/etc. collections that they are willing to share and those become extensions of the library. If you want an item from a private collection, email them and see if they can loan it to you (with checkout and reminders registered in the library computer, of course). The systems for "real" libraries like Koha and evergreen are overkill for something like this. Anybody know of anything close to this or at least could provide the first level of functionality (without the cool features)?
Googlebot, for one.
Millions and millions. 8^)
There are extremely strong technical reasons not to rely on JavaScript to deliver content. This is just one of the most obvious.
By all means, go ahead and use JavaScript. Just don't rely on it, or you'll be sorry.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
WRONG! The update added to the summary of the slashdot article that first spread the erroneous meme that you were reinforcing (and which was further distorted into the even more erroneous notion that you were "correcting"):
MySQL AB's Director of Architecture (and former Slash programmer) Brian Aker corrects an apparent miscommunication in a blog post: "we are just starting to roll out [Enterprise] binaries... We don't build binaries for Debian in part because the Debian community does a good job themselves... If you call MySQL and you have support we support you if you are running Debian (the same with Suse, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu and others)... someone in Sales was left with the wrong information"
Bottom line: You can buy and receive enterprise support from MySQL AB, even if you're not using Red Hat or SUSE.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
from /Evergreen-ILS-1.0.1/Evergreen/src/extras/import/d rain-batgirl-charge.pl:
g irl.gsu.edu','miker','poopie');
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:database=reports;host=bat
They're also using PostgreSQL, as described in the FAQ, but the FAQ has no mention of MySQL. Someone should probably change the MySQL password on batgirl.gsu.edu, if they haven't already.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
Wow, just skimmed that site and played with the demo a bit and it looks pretty awesome. I used to do some tech work for a local library, and they used a management system from Follett, and had a massive upgrade from an older version to a newer version while I was there. Does Evergreen offer any sort of importing or upgrading from other management systems? This sound like it would be very beneficial to public libraries, especially if the regional co-ops/consortiums adopted it. But unless they can easily import their existing catalogs into the OSS software, they're probably not going to want to re-add and redo their existing setups altogether.
I find it very encouraging that education and oss are working hand in hand, because they are both heading toward the same goal of information.
The only ONLY things one can count on a web browser understanding is plaintext (7 bit ascii) and HTML. Requiring Javascript, especially with all the really nasty bugs that it, and its implementations, have is an asshole thing to do. You seem to be an asshole.
While I don't argue the point ( I very much am an asshole ), I happen to be an asshole that's right. So let me ask you this; Which version of HTML should they depend on? Obviously CSS is out; As is xhtml. Hell, html4.0 would probably be a bad idea too.
And how about this html anyway? Who's to say that's useful at all, with all it's buggy implementations. Telnet. Everyone has telnet, and it's pretty hard to fook telnet session.
Javascript adds functionality to a website; It's oddities are well understood for the major browsers, and it's not as if it's hard to get a hold of a browser that does javascript.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
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.Yes, really. I think its fair to say that this particular set of libraries (almost the entire set of libraries in the state of Georgia) has staked its future on an open-source library system: they're staking their future not just on the code they've developed and released to open source, but also on Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, SpiderMonkey, Mozilla/XUL, Jabber, lib-dbi / lib-dbd, and umpteen Perl modules. Take away the OSS pieces that make up that system, and you take away their ability to function as a library. So yes, their future within the state of Georgia depends on OSS.