Developing a crush on Evergreen

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Developing a crush on Evergreen

• Dan Scott, Laurentian University
• October 9, 2009

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• My relationship to Evergreen

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• About Conifer...

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• Evergreen and Conifer
• ca. 2007

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Cautionary tales (1)

• If you want to get things done, you need to
  commit resources to the tasks

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Cautionary tales (2)

• Giving your primary developer the additional role
  of project manager, on top of full-time
  librarianship responsibilities, might not give
  you the results you desire

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• Evergreen and Conifer
• ca. 2008

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• How academics learn

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• Evergreen and Conifer
• ca. 2009
• In production as of May 2009!
• 2 million bib records, 2.5 million copies
• 40,000 users

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Conifer hardware
Web
SLB
If we add a second brick, neutron becomes a
standalone memcached server
Starburst (syslog / onsite backup)
dwarf (off-site backup)
Polaris DB(Master)
Galaxy DB(Slave)
Replica for reports and disaster recovery
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Cautionary tales (3)

• Nobody likes a prenuptial agreement... until
  things get messy

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Cautionary tales (4)

• Free software is never gratis, and not
  necessarily cheap.

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Cautionary tales (5)

• Budgets change and they don't often grow.
• Your plans may have to change accordingly.

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• Reservations about reserves

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Cautionary tales (6)

• Loosely coupled means loosely coupled, and that's
  not always good
• OLE, OCLC, take note!

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What hath Conifer wrought

• Internationalization support
• Migration scripts, customized skins, discussions
• Localized URIs
• Basic serials display and editing
• Reserves module
• Lots of input on how acquisitions works in
  Canadian academic institutions
• Z39.50 server maturity
• Early testing (and fixing) of the 1.6 release

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Serials in Evergreen 1.6
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Serials, in full MFHD glory
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Challenges at the academic level

• Circulation rules
• Set date/time instead of just interval
• Override time as well as date
• Interlibrary loan
• Integration of incoming ILL items
• Z39.50 server needs finer-grained indices
• Z39.50 server has some i18n holes

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Challenges at the academic level

• OPAC - refined metadata display in templates
• Reporting no default set of report templates
• Adjustment in general to user-friendly search
• Controlled process to roll out updates

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Downtime
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Problems, features, and docs
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Canada a nation of Evergreen early adopters

• David Fiander, UWO (SIP MFHD developer)
• BC Sitka (second live system)
• UPEI (first academic library)
• Innisfil Township, Ontario (first known
  self-hosted public library)
• Conifer (first academic library consortium)
• Natural Resources Canada
• Manitoba SPRUCE (public library consortium)
• Mohawk College, Hamilton, Ontario

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Measuring project health

• Number of committers affiliation
• Number of submitted patches
• Documentation
• Testing
• Community and commercial support
• Current releases release history

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Good things to come

• A maturing community

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Measuring community email
Statistics courtesy
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Measuring community commits
Statistics courtesy
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• WANTED skilled developers!

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• Building an on-ramp for developers

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• Communicate, communicate, communicate

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• Rethinking the release process

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• Better living through automation

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• I look forward to tests

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• Shorter release cycles

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• Documentation

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• A solid foundation

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Please bear with us...
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http//www.flickr.com/photos/davidw/2132684141/
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http//www.flickr.com/photos/tronics/380379732/
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http//www.flickr.com/photos/julien_harneis/302793
6866/
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http//www.flickr.com/photos/33619843_at_N08/31255324
14/
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http//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/FileHydropwer_P
ipeline_McKenzie_Country.jpg
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More information

• Evergreen home http//evergreen-ils.org
• Blog aggregator http//planet.evergreen-ils.org
• Mailing lists http//evergreen-ils.org/listserv.p
  hp
• IRC evergreen on chat.freenode.net