Evergreen and Conifer or...

How to amaze your friends and astound your enemies by building a union catalogue on the

cheap(ish)

John FinkDigital Technologies Development Librarian

McMaster University

My relationship with the ILS, 1995-2008:

...

But first, for the uninitiated

What is Evergreen? It's an ILS that... Is scalable... Built on open standards... Runs on stock hardware... And is open source!

That sounds terrific. Why isn't everyone everywhere using this?

Open Source (again) Many many different pieces == many many

places to break. Install process getting better, but... New ways of doing things == learning curve... ...but...

Break the shell and you'll find magic.

But you knew that already, right?

So what's Project Conifer? It's a confederation of five institutions: McMaster, Laurentian, Windsor (mid-2007) Then NOSM and Algoma University (mid-2008) ...but probably nobody else (yet)... With a single ILS install in Guelph. ...(Guelph?)

What Conifer is NOT:

Provincially comprehensive Official at any sort of OCUL-type level Its own, separate entity An OhioLINK-style resource sharing scheme or... Operational (May 2009!)

Step back, and breathe...

Of course, now you're asking yourself... ...but hey, why would any one of you, let alone

five of you, decide to ditch the ILS systems you have now which are working pretty well, or at least decently right now, and jump into something Completely Unknown?

well...

It's NOT unknown

Examples of Evergreen installs: Georgia PINES (~280 libraries) BC SITKA (18 libraries) Michigan Library Consortium (Welcome GRPL!) The Indiana Open Source ILS Initiative ...and UPEI.

So it's proven, but...

At the moment, it lacks what we would consider more ”academic” features, like acquistions, serials, reserves, and batch import/export.

These are due in with version 2.0 later this year.

And other things, like internationalization, a Z39.50 server, a better admin interface...

...these come in 1.4 (this month!)

At the risk of sounding like this guy:

Or (maybe) worse yet:

We're doing this because:

All of us, in one form or another, have had proprietary software companies fail us; whether it's because the software or hardware is being end-of-lifed, and migration costs are exorbitant.

And nowadays, we're smart enough to take some measure of responsibility for the operation and development of our own software.

But really, we're afraid:

Of being told we can do something but then having it taken from us

Of being locked into a platform that is dying a slow death due to corporate takeovers or an arbitrary technology shift.

Of dependencies.

tl;dr

If you can't open it, you don't own it.

So really, it's less a ”hey this software is free and we don't have to pay for it woo-hoo” kind of thing and more a ”holy cripes we need to take a little

more interest in what, exactly, this piece of software – long the central kernel of the library –

is doing.”

Because it's not cheap – there are hardware and opportunity costs involved, and just about any

change means at least some modicum of training, and a whole lot of headache.

But we at least have one advantage..

We (McMaster) are not planning on changing our patron interface – Endeca – and any reasonable

discovery layer ought to function without too much hacking.

Ten years on?

One year later, they went out of business.

Image credits:

Uncle Karl image courtesy of WikipediaStallman image courtesy of gnu.org

love/hate photo courtesy of fr@ns @ flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiji_art/2414595461/

Coherent image courtesy of mrbill @ flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870228/

EG install image courtesy of G. Hill, K. Thornley:http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/59.php