This presentation was provided by Art Rhyno and Guoying (Grace) Liu of The University of Windsor during the NISO event, "Library Resource Management Systems: New Challenges, New Opportunities," held October 8 - 9, 2009.

1. 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
Windsor’s Experience

2. 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

3. What is Conifer?
From Google Map

4. 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

5. 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

6. Art’s trip to here…
1989-1993 worked on a SPIRES-based ILS at Memorial
University and wrote his first MARC editor
1993-1995 joined Windsor, a beta partner in the
development of Notis Horizon, one of the first client/server
library systems
1995-1997 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

7. Art’s 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
1999-2002 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

8. The ILS Symposium - Nov. 15,
2006

9. PINES - a very big challenge
for OSS solutions

10. A Shocking Slide from the ILS
Symposium…
PINES Cost Comparison

11. An ILS with a growing track
record for consortia

12. An ILS also for academic
libraries

13. OpenSRF and Evergreen

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

15. 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

16. The New OPAC

17. OPAC Customizations
P. Zimmerman, 2009

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

19. Integrating with SFX

20. Uniting All Formats of Holdings in SFX

21. Links
Conifer UW OPAC:
http://windsor.concat.ca/opac/en-
CA/skin/uwin/xml/
Conifer Discuss Group:
http://groups.google.ca/group/conifer-discuss
Evergreen Wiki:
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/wiki.php
Equinox:
http://esilibrary.com

22. Thank you!
Contact:
Art Rhyno: arhyno@uwindsor.ca
Grace Liu: gliu@uwindsor.ca