State of the Open ILS

Dan Scott

OLA SuperConference

Friday, February 1, 2008

Launch

On September 5th, 2006, Evergreen went live in

Georgia PINES with:

Online catalogue

Patron self-service

Cataloging

Circulation

Report

252 libraries, 8 million items, 1 system

Community

Why is Laurentian going green?

Our current ILS does not meet our needs:

Upgrading to the current supported version broke our

bilingual notices

Most investments in customizing our ILS would be

thrown away if we move to a new discovery layer or

system – “API lock-in”

We have to migrate to new hardware anyway

Our systems librarian is a developer

We are not alone...

Project Conifer

Consortial installation of Evergreen for academics

(Laurentian, McMaster, and Windsor) – rough plan:

Deploy test cluster (5 beefy servers)

Install, configure, start loading data

Test and improve Usability – collect feedback, improve, and iterate

Performance and load

Expected benefits include new services, cost

sharing, interoperability, and skills development

Let's get the ugly stuff out of the way

Myths and misinformation

“Evergreen makes the same mistakes as traditional

ILSes; what we need is a loosely coupled system

built on a service oriented architecture (SOA)”

The heart of Evergreen is the Open Service Request

Framework (OpenSRF) – an SOA that uses JSON over

XMPP server as the service bus and Perl, C, Java, and

Python* as service method implementation languages

Evergreen currently looks like a traditional ILS because

all of the underlying components are surfaced to the user

in a unified interface (staff client or catalog)

Myths and misinformation

“Evergreen is great for public library consortiums

with hundreds of branches, but doesn't scale down.”

Tell that to Carson Area – Crystal City Schools (who run

Evergreen for their high school libraries)!

My own experiences: I develop and test Evergreen on my laptop (1.5 GB RAM) –

currently loaded with 50,000 records

I build and distribute Evergreen in VMWare images that run

happily in 512 MB of RAM

Myths and misinformation

“Evergreen forces a top-down hierarchy on the

libraries in a consortial implementation.”

While its administrative model does support a

hierarchical structure, you can create a flat hierarchy with

an unlimited number of top-level members of that

hierarchy

Each member can have its own policies, its own

catalogue branding regardless of hierarchy

Myths and misinformation

“Evergreen is too hard to install.”

How many times have you installed your current ILS?

Evergreen does have a lot of system dependencies, but

install scripts for Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo now do

most of the work for you.

I'll be giving an Evergreen install and customization

session at Code4Lib 2008 during a 2.5 hour time slot

Myths and misinformation

“We don't have the skills to support this ourselves.”

Nothing forces you to support Evergreen yourself; if you

have an ILS today, you probably don't support that

yourself

You can buy a support contract for Evergreen - and there

are actually multiple businesses competing for your

Evergreen support dollars!

So what does Evergreen have today?So what does Evergreen have today?

Part 1: Patron interfacePart 1: Patron interface

Discovery interface

Discovery: spell check

Discovery: results

Discovery: detailed record

Discovery: shelf browser

Socializing: Book bags

Book bags: RSS

Patron self-service

So what does Evergreen have today?So what does Evergreen have today?

Part 2: Staff ClientPart 2: Staff Client

Circulation

Patron interface

Cataloging features

Built-in Z39.50 client with support for searching

multiple sources

MARC editor with contextual help, support for

templates, validation

Rudimentary authorities support

Can load authorities, but can't define them on the fly

'Bucket' support for performing bulk operations on

records and items

Z39.50 client

MARC editor

Buckets: merging records

Reporting interface

So what's in the works?

What about acquisitions?

Started by trying to integrate Apache OFBiz

We learned a lot, but OFBiz is HUGE

Opted to build what we need for fast iterations

Rapid progress in January:

OpenSRF plumbing for budgets, funds, picklists

Web interface built on Pylons

EDI capabilities to be provided by BOTS

Target: a complete “buy a book” acquisitions

scenario by the end of February

Tell me about serials

Financial parts of serials are being built along with

acquisitions

Plan for serials patterns - overlay one or more basic

calendar schedules, with exceptions

Example: 13 issues a year = 1 monthly + 1 annual

Example: 364 issues a year = 1 daily – 1 annual

exception

Want to support easy check-ins, even though print

subscriptions are declining – inspired by Kardex?

Academic reserves?

No academic reserves functionality yet

Basic design for academic reserves:

Reserve item will be added to a class “bucket”

A class bucket will map to one or more instructors, a

class name, and a class code

A class bucket will override its reserve items' location

and circulation policy

Eventually we would like to integrate with course

management software

Documentation

Wiki

Mailing lists

The Book of Evergreen

Are we there yet?

We're working on all of this; it's being built one line

of code at a time

Advocacy work and day-to-day business operations has

slowed down the pace of development for core team

My time is split between project management and

development – oh yeah, and my ongoing hardware &

software & collection development responsibilities

More dedicated skilled resources could propel this

project ahead (welcome back, David Fiander!)

But we're a geek-free zone!

If you don't have the skills in-house to set up and

configure Evergreen, commercial support is an

option for: Installing and configuring

Migration

Training

Support

Custom development

Complete hosted system

How do I get started?

Get on the mailing lists and the IRC channel

Please send us your acquisitions workflows (who does

what and why) - requesting, selecting, approving,

ordering, receiving, rolling over, and anything else...

Play with the demo site (http://demo.gapines.org)

Both the OPAC and the Staff Client

Try out one of our VMWare images (you can run

Linux on Windows!)

Read up on the wiki

Questions?

When we're out of time, let's go for coffee.

References

Evergreen project: http://open-ils.org/

Project Conifer: http://conifer.mcmaster.ca/

My blog: http://coffeecode.net

The Evergreen logo is a trademark of Georgia

Public Library Service.

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons

Attribution 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of

this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ca/ or

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