State of the Open ILS

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State of the Open ILS

• Dan Scott
• OLA SuperConference
• Friday, February 1, 2008

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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

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Community
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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...

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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

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• Let's get the ugly stuff out of the way

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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)?

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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

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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

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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

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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!

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• So what does Evergreen have today?
• Part 1 Patron interface

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Discovery interface
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Discovery spell check
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Discovery results
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Discovery detailed record
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Discovery shelf browser
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Socializing Book bags
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Book bags RSS
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Patron self-service
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• So what does Evergreen have today?
• Part 2 Staff Client

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Circulation
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Patron interface
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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

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Z39.50 client
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MARC editor
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Buckets merging records
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Reporting interface
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• So what's in the works?

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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

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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?

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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

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Documentation

• Wiki
• Mailing lists
• The Book of Evergreen

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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!)?

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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

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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

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Questions?

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

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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.

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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/lic
  enses/by/2.5/ca/ or send a letter to Creative
  Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San
  Francisco, California, 94105, USA.