Kent County’s Quest,or, The Evergreen

Fairytale

Karen Collier, Public Services LibrarianAndrea Buntz Neiman, Technical Services Librarian

Once upon

a time

…

But What About…?

Consortial Capabilities Support & Hosting Costs Hardware Costs

Matthew, Birth and 1 Year

The story behind the fairytale

We can’t make this stuff up! Money is tight for everyone

Administrators need to do more with less Private software firms have tried to expand profit

margins (guess who pays for that?) Our budget was a large factor in deciding to

go with Evergreen

Open Source in Libraries

Howard County (MD) Public Library – makes wide use of Open Source in several areas

The Open Source movement and libraries share many concepts & ideals Information access = free Public domain = a good thing Public knowledge = a better thing Collaborative projects = go team! More with less = par for the course

Common myths about Open Source Too much of a “techie” thing

Truth : even beginners can do it! Too fractured

Most OSS projects have standard versions Too much work

Global community of support Too “different”

“The way we’ve always done it” is no excuse

Advantages of OSS for Libraries Cost savings vs. proprietary software Flexible, user-centered development Staff ownership of open source software Giving back Freeeeeeeeeeeeeedom!

Catalogers & OSS : a love story? They say we’re compulsive, but we really just

like things to be in order, and make sense Many ILSs currently on the market are based

on ideas & structures that are 20 or more years old (MARC is even older)

OpenGovInfo.net – 04/27/2009 – “Ten reasons why cataloging librarians make natural programmers”

Happiness (my personal version)

Thick book

Comfy pillows Cat 1, Miu

Cat 2, George

Happiness (my professional version) Evergreen 1.4

Modern architecture that’s completely scalable, built using the Mozilla engine & OpenSRF

Intuitive staff interface that supports workflow FRBR-ization (edition rollup) Sophisticated & powerful context menus Bookbags – for personal & professional use Native z39.50 that doesn’t make me crazy Importer that can handle batches Batch deletes that don’t crash the system

Search results in Evergreen

Basic staff interface in Evergreen

Cataloging interface in Evergreen

Holdings maintenance in Evergreen

Native Z39.50 interface in Evergreen

MARC import/export interface

Changes in Evergreen 1.6

More highly customizable search interface Scoped searches for electronic resources Z39.50 holdings support Holdings export on all record formats Administrative UI improvements Serials support & MFHD support Acquisitions module preview

Open Source in KCPL’s future Open Office GIMP (photo editing software) Groovix PAC (PC management) Drupal (content management) LibraryFind (federated search) Maybe even full Linux!

Some of our favorite OS sites

Open-ILS, home of Evergreen http://www.open-ils.org/

Equinox Software http://esilibrary.com/esi/

oss4lib (Open source systems for libraries) http://www.oss4lib.org/

Open Sense Solutions http://open-sense.com/

Howard County PL Open Source Blog http://hclibrary.org/opensource/

Thank you!

http://catalog.kentcountylibrary.org Karen Collier, kcollier@kent.lib.md.us Andrea Buntz Neiman, aneiman@kent.lib.md.us

Original material in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.