The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 2, Issue 9 - October, 2009

As a reminder, we post this newsletter to the Evergreen general discussion list as well as to this blog. Cross-posting and forwarding are encouraged.

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Development and Documentation Update, Evergreen People, Evergreen Jobs, Lyrasis Evergreen Classes, New Evergreen Libraries, Planet Evergreen, A Few Reminders, Newsletter Administrivia

Michigan Evergreen Demo Schedule at MLA Nov 4-5: Michigan Evergreen staff will be demonstrating the Evergreen open-source ILS software at the Michigan Library Association conference in Lansing on November 4-5 in the MLC booth (#201-203). If you’re attending the MLA conference, please stop by and check it out!

Friday, December 11, 2009 How's It Going?: An Inside Look at Bibliomation's Migration to Evergreen 9:30 coffee, 10:00-noon meeting Middlebury PL: Online Registration coming soon at www.ctlibrarians.org.

The 2010 Evergreen International Conference will be held April 21-23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids Michigan. The Conference website contains general information, schedule, exhibitor information, sponsorship information, a link to the Grand Rapids Convention and Visitors Bureau, a link to the Amway for online reservations, and a link to the registration site. Please join us for an exciting 3 days of learning, sharing, networking, and fun in Grand Rapids! http://www.evergreen2010.org/

• LibraryThing for Libraries is now available for Evergreen. As stated in the announcement from LibraryThing, "We've integrated both the Catalog Enhancements (tags, tag browser, recommendations, other editions and translations) and the Reviews Enhancement (300,000 LibraryThing reviews, patron reviewing, Facebook app, blog widgets)."
  • For more information, check out the original announcement on the LibraryThing Blog and see it in action on the Kent County Public Library's catalogue.
• The first Developer Meeting on IRC took place on October 16, 2009. All members of the community with an interest in contributing to the development of Evergreen were invited to attend and attendence on the #evergreen hit 53 participants at its peak. The priority item, the upcoming 1.6 release, was the top item on the agenda, and other issues, such as lowering the barriers to participation, quality assurance, and future developments were also tackled. All in all, it was a very productive first meeting and future ones are planned. If you missed it, meeting notes are now available online.
  • The origianl announcement
  • Stats for the meeting
  • Agenda and Meeting Notes
• Dan Scott gave an Evergreen Developer Workshop and Presentation at FSOSS 2009 in Toronto, ON, Canada at the end of October. Dan has made his tutorial available online, both as a web page and as a tarball containing the notes from the web page, presentation slides, and code samples used during the presentation. These resources are very valuable for new Evergreen developers and will evolve as Dan incorporates feedback. Dan also notes that he'll be offering an extended version of this workshop at OLA 2010 next February.
• The very popular Access 2009 conference took place in Prince Edward Island, Canada at the start of October. Equinox's Mike Rylander gave a tag-team presentation with Roy Tennant of OCLC called "ILS in the Sky with Diamonds." Mike talked about cloud computer in general, Evergreen's Service Oriented Architecture, and how Evergreen can be used in Software as a Service (Saas) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) setups. A video talk is available online at the Access 2009 website.
• The Evergreen Documentation Interest Group (DIG) had their monthly meeting on October 21st and discussed, among other things, licensing issues for documentation, how to organize the documentation being written, how best to help volunteers learn DocBook, and the progress being made so far. Anyone interested can listen to recordings of past meetings online.
  • To learn more about DIG, please visit our wiki page. We're always looking for people interested in helping out with our documentation efforts, whether by writing new documentation, testing and editing existing documentation, converting documentation to DocBook format, or any number of other essential tasks both big and small. If you think you might be interested in helping out, contact the DIG facilitators at docs@evergreen-ils.org.

• A list of the Evergreen regulars on IRC is available on the Wiki
• Bibliomation has been spotlighting their people on the BOSS blog:
  • Kate Sheehan
  • Melissa Lefebvre
  • Ben Shum
• King County Library System, in Washington state, was awarded a $998,556 IMLS grant.

They will use the grant to develop a peer-to-peer library community support model for open source migrations and future software development.

Equinox Software has a slew of openings, including Educational Services Manager, System Administrator, Sales Executive, and Software Developer (the more the merrier).

Lyrasis is offering one Evergreen class in the near future:

Evergreen Administration and Statistics Module (Live Online)

12/3/2009, 10:00am-12:00pm EST

To register, please see the Lyrasis website.

For close to a year, Lyrasis (created from a merger of SOLINET and PALINET) has taught dozens of Evergreen classes. Lyrasis is dedicated to training and instructing Evergreen, and they welcome your comments and suggestions for courses. All of their current course offerings are continuously updated, and Lyrasis plans to add more courses in the future. For comments or questions, contact Lyrasis instructors Jennifer.Bielewski@lyrasis.org or Jenny.Liberatore@lyrasis.org

• Evergreen Indiana
  • On October 7, Roachdale-Franklin Township public library (previously non-automated) migrated to Evergreen. On October 8 and October 29, Jay County Public Library and Westfield Washington Public Library, respectively, migrated to Evergreen. These three migrations bring to 43 the number of Indiana libraries online with Evergreen. These 43 libraries serve over 480,000 Indiana residents and provide a shared resource catalog holding over 2.7 million items. The Evergreen Indiana consortium has 69 members.

• SC LENDS
  • Calhoun Public Library went live on Oct 15, 2009.
  • Chesterfield Public Library went live on Oct 15, 2009.
  • Dorchester Public Library went live on Oct 15, 2009.
  • York Public Library went live on Oct 15, 2009.
• Greater Laverdiere Family Library Network, one of the first personal libraries to use Evergreen.

Can’t get enough news about Evergreen open source software? Subscribe to or read Planet Evergreen, an aggregator for Evergreen-related posts. Have a blog that talks about Evergreen? To add your blog to the Planet Evergreen blog aggregator, send email to Dan Scott at dan@coffeecode.net

Latest entries on Planet Evergreen:

Evergreen has a Flickr set and a Facebook group.

Bibliomation has a Facebook group for their Open Source Project, BibliOak.

Feel free to forward, share, etc.! The co-wranglers for this newsletter (produced every month–sometimes earlier, sometimes later–what can we say!) are …

Jason Etheridge, Equinox

Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation, terlagaATbiblioDOTorg