User Tools

Site Tools


faqs:feedback_questions

This is an old revision of the document!


Some questions which aren't frequently asked (yet), but have been asked

I read on your website that someone used Evergreen in their personal/home library. How would I go about doing that?

While this is possible, there are a few things to consider:

  1. Evergreen will likely be overkill for your needs, but can be fun to play with.
  2. Evergreen runs on Linux, so when it comes to system maintenance (performing upgrades, applying patches, backing up data, etc.), it would help to have some familiarity/comfort with the Linux command line.
  3. Evergreen was built by and for professional librarians, who have specialized jargon, workflows, and legacy data formats. For example, metadata for your items would be stored in "bibliographic records" in a format known as MARC. Data in MARC is designated by tags and subfield codes. A title might be signified by tag 245, yet in the library world there are different types of titles, each designated by a different tag or combination of tags and subfields. That said, you could learn just enough to get things to display in your catalog and ignore everything else (though it might horrify a library cataloger).
  4. There are single libraries that use Evergreen, but Evergreen was built for handling multiple libraries at once, and you can see that in the prevalence of library selector menus. In general, Evergreen is meant to manage complex libraries, and that calls for some complexity and overhead in turn, things which might not be needed in an application targeting more modest use cases.
  5. Items in Evergreen are typically barcoded, though you could just enter their titles if you don't need to track them physically.

Disclaimers aside, probably the first thing you should do is download the staff client and connect to one of the demo servers. There is documentation and tutorials. Play around and see if it might work for you. For running your own server, perhaps the simplest step would be to install Virtualbox and run an Evergreen virtual image with it. Otherwise, check out the download and installation instructions.

faqs/feedback_questions.1313717279.txt.gz · Last modified: 2022/02/10 13:34 (external edit)

Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license: CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Donate Powered by PHP Valid HTML5 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki

© 2008-2022 GPLS and others. Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under GNU GPLv2 or later.
The Evergreen Project is a U.S. 501(c)3 non-profit organization.