See this Google Docs page. Google Calendar coming very soon!

Wednesday, May 20, 5:30 - 7:30, will feature an opening-night combined reception and vendor exhibit, with excellent noshes and refreshments. If you're a vendor, this is a super opportunity to mingle with the high-octane Evergreen community. If you're a member of the Evergreen community, this is a way to slake your traveler's thirst, tamp down that late-afternoon hunger, and rub shoulders with Evergreeners, developers, newbies, and more.

Don't forget to sign up for the dine-arounds so all of you can head out with some old and new friends your first evening at the conference!

We are delighted to announce that Jessamyn West and Joe Lucia will be keynote speakers at the first-ever Evergreen International Conference, May 20-22 at the Classic Center in Athens, Georgia!

(Note: have a question in advance for Jessamyn or Joe? Feel free to post here or to the Evergreen lists.)

Joe Lucia

Opening keynote, Thursday, May 21, 9 a.m.

Joe Lucia is the University Librarian and director of Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University. His advocacy for open source led his library to develop Vufind, an open-source discovery layer for library catalogs. Villanova University recently received a prestigious $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration for the Project VuFind software.

Joe was also recently elected president of PALINET, one of the largest and oldest regional U.S. library networks, serving 600 institutional members in the mid-Atlantic region.

These are just TWO of the many wonderful reasons to attend the first-ever Evergreen International Conference this May. See you there!

Jessamyn West

Closing Keynote, Friday, May 22, 11 a.m.

Jessamyn West is a librarian living in rural Vermont who solves technology problems for schools and libraries. She has been speaking on the intersection of libraries, technology and politics since 2003 and has given presentations in twenty-six U.S. states, three Australian states and three Canadian provinces.

Jessamyn also gained YouTube fame with her video documenting installing Ubuntu on a public library computer. Jessamyn could be said to be a big fan of "open" — open source, open access, open libraries. She has written and published widely, and also maintains the highly popular, long-lived and immensely readable blog, http://librarian.net.

See the "It's Your Conference" page for full descriptions, but here's the times for these:

• Hackfests: Wednesday, May 20, 9-12 and 1-4
• Lightning Talks: Friday, May 22, 9 a.m. (selection jury to meet Thursday, 4:15)
• BoF/Table Talks: Thursday's luncheon (12-1:30), Friday's continental breakfast (8-9)

See this Google Spreadsheet to view programs by day, time, and track. Below is a list of programs by track and within track, by time.

• Migration Nation: Planning for Success (Jennifer Bielewski, Katherine Gregory, Shae Tetterton)
  • Thursday, May 21, 10:15 a.m.
  • This will be a lively, well-informed panel presentation by three experts well-versed in Evergreen migrations. Learn what you can do ahead of time to make your migration more successful and what tasks and resources are involved in a typical migration schedule. Panelists: Jennifer Bielewski, Educational Services Librarian; Katherine Gregory, PINES Services Specialist; and Shae Tetterton, Equinox Project Manager.

• You’re Live… Now What? (Emily Almond, PINES)
  • Thursday, May 21, 11:15 a.m.
  • This presentation by Emily Almond, PINES Software Development Manager, will describe the post-migration activities of evolving the balance of support and expertise so you can use Evergreen for the benefit of all stakeholders and continue organizationally to remain a flexible, knowledgeable library.

• Ready, Fire, Aim! Lessons Learned from a New Shared Catalog (Evette Atkin, Michigan Library Consortium)
  • Thursday, May 21, 1:30 p.m.
  • Evette Atkin, Evergreen Coordinator at Michigan Library Consortium, will describe the Michigan Library Consortium's pilot project to create an Evergreen shared catalog. Seven pilot libraries went live on Evergreen during the Summer/Fall of 2008. Facing a steep learning curve, no applicable model, little to no instruction and very few resources, they forged ahead into the unknown, yielding many expected and unexpected results… and lived to tell about it.

• The Emotional Impact of Open Source (Elizabeth McKinney, PINES)
  • Thursday, May 21, 2:30 p.m.
  • PINES Program Director Elizabeth McKinney will share how moving to an open source ILS is a major sea-change for libraries that have been accustomed to the workflows and relationships from the proprietary software world.

• Get Out of the Frying Pan! (Lori Ayre, The Galecia Group and Cheryl Gould, Fully Engaged Libraries)
  • Thursday, May 21, 3:30 p.m.
  • Sure, Evergreen is exciting because it is free and Open Source, but the best part of moving to Evergreen is the opportunity to control your destiny. With an Open Source Library System you have the potential to empower your staff and optimize your users' experiences by getting involved in improving the software. There are many ways to get involved that can make a big difference in where Evergreen development goes and how fast it gets there. This session uses activities and interactive games to help participants understand (from the inside) the cultural shift that needs to happen so they can take advantage of their participation in this Open Source project and not just remain passive bystanders.

• Evergreen in BC Libraries: The SITKA Story (Ben Hyman, BC SITKA)
  • Friday, May 22, 10:00 a.m.
  • In April 2007, BC public libraries endorsed a proposal to pilot Evergreen and struck an ILS Advisory Committee to manage a consortial installation of Evergreen. Since then, fourteen libraries have gone live, with up to 17 more in the queue for 2009, and many more beyond. Learn how the SITKA initiative went from idea to implementation in just

over six months due to a broad range of grass-roots support and gumption. Hear pilot library migration stories, advisory committee anecdotes, and governance grumbles and glories; Find out about what's coming next in the SITKA story.

• Dawn Dale, PINES: Evergreen: Easy to Learn, Easy to Use
  • Thursday, May 21, 10:15 a.m.
  • This is a great program for people just beginning to learn about Evergreen that will also showcase Evergreen's user-friendliness. Dawn Dale, PINES Helpdesk Assistant, will walk you through an overview of daily functions for front-line library staff, including issuing cards, searching for patrons, grouping families, checking out and in, searching the catalog, placing holds, and understanding the features in the "My Account" function.

• Evergreen in Armenia (Tigran Zargaryan, Fundamental Scientific Library, Armenia)
  • Thursday, May 21, 11:15 a.m.
  • There are a number of potential Evergreen deployments in developing countries. A team of technical librarians at the Fundamental Scientific Library in Armenia have worked hard to make Evergreen a success. The Library leads a network of libraries in 30 research institutions. Early testing and study of a range of FOSS ILSs identified Koha and Evergreen as the most likely candidates. Participation in the eIFL-FOSS ILS Project provided a platform for piloting both ILSs, eventually settling upon Evergreen as the preferred choice. Presenter: Tigran Zargaryan, Fundamental Scientific Library.

• Voices of Experience (Chris Sharp, GPLS)
  • Thursday, May 21, 1:30 p.m.
  • PINES administrative staff from the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS), along with PINES member library staff will present a panel discussion of the issues involved, lessons learned, and benefits gained from developing and using the Evergreen ILS since September 2006. GPLS staff will share the origins of the decision to move from vendor-based library automation solutions to the homegrown Open Source solution that became Evergreen, then will take questions from conference attendees. Led by Chris Sharp, PINES Program Manager.

• Bibliographic Database Integrity (Elaine Hardy and Bin Lin, PINES)
  • Thursday, May 21, 2:30 p.m.
  • Establishing and maintaining a shared database that is clean and stays clean is a challenge in a consortial environment. Using the PINES experience, the presenters, both with extensive cataloging expertise, will discuss best practices and how to avoid clean-up problems. Bin Lin will discuss the importance of developing consortial policies and procedures for cataloging, training and adhering to standards in the consortial environment for both in-house cataloging and working with outsourcing. Elaine Hardy will discuss known problems with the PINES database, illustrating the hazards of merging databases with divergent levels of quality and multiple sources for bibliographic records.

• Electronic Government Publications for PINES (Jim Veatch, Justine Veatch)
  • Thursday, May 21, 3:30 p.m.
  • Evergreen is a fine venue for electronic documents, and the presenters will offer some actual examples of some items in PINES. The presenters have extensive experience in this area and will discuss collection development, cataloging, and cost considerations of adding significant content to the catalog. Presenters will display publications for a variety of patron types, offer concrete suggestions for selection, and distribute handouts. Co-presenters: Jim Veatch, Technical Services Manager, Bartram Trail Regional Library, Washington, GA and Justine Veatch, Library Consultant, Evans, GA.

• Karen Collier and Andrea Buntz Neiman, Kent County Public Library, Maryland: Evergreen and Small Libraries
  • Friday, May 22, 10:00 a.m.
  • Do you want to go Open Source, but worry that it's too difficult to manage? Are you a small library with limited technology support? Are you an Administrator looking to cut costs without sacrificing service? Then you need to hear Karen Collier and Andrea Buntz Neiman of Kent County Library in Maryland tell the tale of two young librarians who jumped to Evergreen Open Source, how they did it in 6 months with a do-or-die deadline, and their tips and favorite features for Evergreen.

• Evergreen Globalization: Past, Present, and Future (Dan Scott, Laurentian University)
  • Thursday, May 21, 10:15 a.m.
  • Globalization is the process of enabling software to support interaction using different sets of cultural norms, such as translating text into different languages and displaying numbers, dates, times, and currencies with different formatting. Over the past three years, Evergreen has made significant progress on globalization: as of the 1.4 release, Evergreen comes bundled with French, Armenian, and Czech translations. In this session, we will trace Evergreen's globalization progress from 1.0, outline the infrastructure used to support globalization as of 1.4, and draw a roadmap for future enhancements to the globalization infrastructure and processes.

• Building New Interfaces (Bill Erickson, Equinox)
  • Thursday, May 21, 11:15 a.m.
  • Evergreen and OpenSRF provide a rich infrastructure for accessing, displaying, and managing data within the system. In this talk, Bill Erickson, Evergreen developer, will start a brief overview of some low-level building blocks, including the object-relational mapping in Evergreen and permission-based data access using the open-ils.pcrud service. This will be followed by a discussion of user interface constuction tools used in Evergreen, including DojoSRF/http-translator, dojo, Template Toolkit, and auto-widgets. The session will end with the construction of a basic new HTML interface (functionality TBD).

• Predicting the Future with MFHD (David Fiander, University of Western Ontario)
  • Thursday, May 21, 1:30 p.m.
  • MARC 21's "MARC Format for Holdings Data" (MFHD) defines two types of data formats intended to help support activities as diverse as claiming missing journal issues, providing a compact and accurate listing of the library's holdings for a giving journal, and determining if the library holds a given issue of a journal. All of these depend on being able to calculate the publication information for the "next" issue. Because the real world of journal publishing is complicated and messy, MFHD is complicated. This talk will give some real-world examples of serial publication patterns that can be challenging to interpret, show how those patterns can be described using the MARC Format for Holdings Data, and discuss the challenges faced in implementing MFHD for Evergreen.

• Bits and Pieces from the UPEI Evergreen Experience (Grant Johnson, University of Prince Edward Island)
  • Thursday, May 21, 2:30 p.m.
  • The University of Prince Edward Island has been using Evergreen 1.2.3 since June 2008. Bits and pieces of the UPEI implementation will be presented, including the rollout process, modification of perspectives, opportunities for workflow change, customizations, and extensibility. Come and explore a few of the ideas we implemented with Open Source and open API in the Evergreen environment, including integration with Drupal, CUFTS, Refworks, Google and more. Brainstorming welcome!

• OpenSRF: Not your father's transparent, cross-platform, multi-language, load balancing, highly available application cluster development framework – OR – How I stopped worrying and learned to love Jabber (Mike Rylander, Equinox)
  • Thursday, May 21, 3:30 p.m.
  • An overview of OpenSRF (Open Service Request Framework), including how it is used within Evergreen, and why it is important for scaling Evergreen installations to any size, large or small. This session will start with a semi-technical overview of OpenSRF, after which we will have Q&A time to discuss the details of OpenSRF in as much or as little technical detail as the audience would like.

• Electronic Resource Management (George Duimovich, Natural Resources Canada)
  • Friday, May 22, 10:00 a.m.
  • George Duimovich of Natural Resources Canada (that country's counterpart to our EPA) will explore ERMs. How does Evergreen move forward with ERM functionality? Are there opportunities to provide solutions across a broader spectrum of ERM requirements, perhaps starting with "ERM lite" rather than "ERM heavy"? And how do we enable Evergreen to better integrate with existing Acquisitions and Serials modules? Duimovich will discuss how despite some potential vendor lock-in issues, commercial solutions may be worth exploring due the current concentration of e-resources "knowledgebases" in the hands of proprietary vendors.