Evergreen: An Open Source ILS

Slide 1: Evergreen: an Open Source ILS John Fink Digital Technologies Development Librarian McMaster University

Slide 2: The ILS: what is it?  A place to find books, yeah, but also...  ... a way for libraries to provide access to:  ... databases  ... e-journals  ...thesis and dissertations.

Slide 3: Our current situation  Proprietary ILS vendors abound, which means...  ...they're expensive  ...they respond slowly to feature requests, if at all.  ...our data is not as portable as we'd like.  What are we paying for?

Slide 4: Does this remind you of anything?  Hey, do you remember:  ...Coherent?  ...Xenix?  ...Ultrix?  ...A/UX?  ...BSD/OS?  There's a good reason for that, huh?

Slide 5: But what we really needed was...  ...a good solid kick to the pants.  A couple of years ago, our vendor was bought by a competing vendor, and that means...  ...product consolidation, which means...  ...we're in trouble.

Slide 6: Fortunately... We're not the only ones with this problem.

Slide 7: There are OSS choices:  Koha  Evergreen  PHPMyBibli  NewGenLib  ... but  Libraries are very risk averse – don't rock the boat!

Slide 8: So, as a result McMaster University decided to migrate off of our current ILS and go with Evergreen.

Slide 9: Who else is using Evergreen?  Georgia PINES  Sitka (BC PINES)  ...and a lot of other people in stealth mode.

Slide 10: Why Evergreen for us?  Open source  ... (of course)  ... so no vendor lock-in  ... transparent access to objects via JSON or XML  ... a known backend  OUR data is OUR data.

Slide 11: Features of Evergreen  Highly flexible organizational hierarchy  Efficient decentralization of front and backend through OpenSRF and Jabber  RSS feeds for users and libraries  A ”book bag”, to save items for later  Automagic relevance detection

Slide 12: But...  Evergreen is missing some key features that academic libraries need...  ...things like acquisitions, serials, and reserves.  ...plus the install is not, uh, very friendly.  ...but since it's open source, we can work on that!

Slide 13: Evergreen support model  Hey, it's open source, so we have...  ...mailing lists (dev and ”normal”)  ...IRC  ...and the option of paid support from many groups.

Slide 14: There's something intensely gratifying about asking for help on IRC or on the lists and getting immediate response from the people that actually wrote your software.

Slide 15: So where are we right now?  Here at Mac we're...  ...in the midst of migration with two other Canadian universities, Windsor and Laurentian, collectively we're known as Project Conifer.  ...target date of summer 2009.

Slide 16: Project Conifer  The goal is to eventually have a shared catalog, where people from Windsor, Laurentian and McMaster all have borrowing rights at each institution, and can easily see eachother's collections.  This is what library people call a ”union catalogue.”  Hopefully, this will make borrowing easier.

Slide 17: Any questions?