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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.

In This Issue

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

Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

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/

Evergreen Development and Documentation Update

• 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 attendance 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 original 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.

Evergreen People

• 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.

Evergreen Jobs

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

Lyrasis Evergreen Classes

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.

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

• 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.

Planet 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

A Few Reminders

Evergreen has a Flickr set and a Facebook group.

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

Newsletter Administrivia

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, jason@esilibrary.com
Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation, terlagaATbiblioDOTorg

Wiki edits also by Karen Collier and Warren Layton

From the first Evergreen development meeting IRC log (with apologies to The Economist):

• 152 (duration in minutes from the official start time of 10:00 AM EDT until the official ending time of 12:32)
• 627 (comments posted during the meeting)
• 57 (peak nicks registered in the channel during the meeting – undoubtedly an all-time record for #evergreen)
• 22 (participants who commented during the meeting)
• 16 (participants who made more than one comment)
• 156 (comments made by the most vocal participant)
• 3 (volunteers to summarize the decisions made and general discussions)
• 2 (final releases expected next week)
• 59 (karma increments)
• 2 (karma decrements)
• 0 (karma decrements targeted at someone other than the one doing the decrementing)

Update: 2009-10-14 8:20 PM EDT: Correct the title so that it accurately reflects the real date of the meeting: Friday, October 16, 2009 @ 10:00 AM EDT.

As discussed on the Evergreen Development mailing list, a public meeting for Evergreen developers that will be held on the #evergreen channel on the Freenode IRC network. All members of the community with an interest in contributing to the development of Evergreen are welcome to attend – and if you are unable to attend at the designated time, please feel free to submit comments for any of the agenda items in advance to the Evergreen development mailing list.

The agenda is continuing to evolve – please, feel free to extend and amend the agenda to ensure that it meets the immediate concerns of the project. We should be able to make the meeting go a bit smoother by doing some work in advance; for example, I’ve taken a few minutes to try and clean up the bugs/features in Trac that I should have closed months ago or deferred to a subsequent release.

For agenda items that have the potential to be too long to express during a single IRC meeting, it would probably make sense to post more considered opinions in advance on this mailing list. Examples of such agenda items might include major release process changes or drastically revising our bug tracking processes. If a given discussion item starts eating up too much meeting time and a decision is not immediately necessary, we can also delegate the responsibility to a volunteer sub-team for investigating alternatives and coming up with a proposal for adoption at the next meeting.

Lastly, all of this is new, so I’m sure there will be plenty of learning as we go!

And two more things from Dan Scott of Conifer (though we didn’t know about this before we went to press with the newsletter): he’s giving a keynote at NELINET’s conference on October 9th with the title “Developing a crush on Evergreen” about Conifer and the state of Evergreen, and will also be giving a talk about Evergreen at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2009.

Zounds! We left this one out of the newsletter. Dan Scott recently blogged about two podcasts, one of which is of great interest to the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group in particular (about licensing open source documentation). Apologies, Dan!

The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 2, Issue 8 — September, 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.

In This Issue…

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Development Update, Evergreen Post-Birthday Links, Evergreen People, Lyrasis Evergreen Classes, New Evergreen Libraries, Newsletter Administrivia

Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

Access 2009 (9/30-10/3): Evergreen developer Mike Rylander and Equinox project manager Shae Tetterton will be there, and there are many open source and Evergreen events there as well. See http://vre2.upei.ca/access2009/

North Carolina Library Association (10/6-10/9): Equinox Software has a booth there, come by and say hello, or ask for a demo!

Indiana Library Federation (10/18-10/20): Come see Equinox Software at the exhibits!

If you have Evergreen-related events to add (talks, conferences, etc.), just email events@evergreen-ils.org.

Evergreen Post-Birthday Links

Evergreen celebrated its third birthday on September 5, and there were two blog posts marking the occasion. Bravo us!

Documentation Interest Group: Onward, XML Soldiers!

The needs assessment for the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group couldn’t have been plainer about the future direction of the DIG–definitely worth reading! Here’s a summary:

The needs assessment group of the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group (DIG) recommends that activities to produce single-source, XML-based project-wide Evergreen documentation commence immediately in these four areas: reports; installation, upgrading, and migrations; cataloging; and circulation. [Note: the DIG concurred at the September 9 meeting, and work has commenced.]

We are forging ahead in that direction!

The wiki page for the DIG has been reorganized and is easier to navigate.

Meanwhile, Paul Weiss, DIG co-facilitator, has moved on to a new, non-Evergreen position, and two DIG members have volunteered to step in as facilitators, something the DIG will ratify at its next meeting in a couple of weeks (TBA on the documentation list). Thanks and good-by to Paul!

Finally, a big, hearty thank you to Mike Peters (Evergreen Indiana) for setting up a test server for the DIG.

Come on board–there’s room for many-a-more! Email docs@evergreen-ils.org for more info.

Evergreen Development Update

Evergreen 1.4.0.6 and Evergreen Release Candidate 1.6.0.0RC1 both recently debuted, and the roll-outs for both, but particularly 1.6, were very smooth.

See the Evergreen Roadmap for a top-level view of what’s coming in 2.0.

Evergreen Jobs

Mohawk College (Ontario) has an opening for a library applications specialist.

Evergreen People

HIRES: Equinox Software Inc., “The Evergreen Experts,” recently hired two more developers: Joe Atzberger and Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley.

Joe’s previous position was as a Koha developer for LibLime. He also worked several previous years as a Technical Specialist supporting INFOhio K-12 libraries and their migrations on SirsiDynix and MultiLIS platforms. Joe came by the library world naturally: both his parents also love books, have English degrees, and his mom is a Reference Librarian.

For the past three years, Lebbeous worked for an information security firm in Cleveland, Ohio, where he primarily wrote software using open source tools. He has applied his passion for programming to diverse problems including vulnerability assessment, network perimeter management, log analysis, and more. Lebbeous also enjoys history, following college football, and video games (sometimes to his wife’s chagrin).

Lyrasis Evergreen Training Classes

Lyrasis is offering two Evergreen classes in the near future:

Evergreen Circulation Module (Live Online)

10/22/2009, 2:00pm-4:00pm EST

Evergreen Administration and Statistics Module (Live Online)

10/22/2009, 2:00pm-4:00pm 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

Planet 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

A Few Reminders

Evergreen has a Flickr set and a Facebook group.

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

Also see the growing list of all known Evergreen libraries. This list is open to all Evergreen libraries, from commercially-supported to “grow-your-own.” Please add your library if it’s not there!

Highlights from the latest additions:

North Texas Library Consortium (NTLC) just rolled out 13 libraries on a shared catalog. Everything’s bigger in Texas! Welcome aboard, NTLC!

Sitka in British Columbia rolled out three more libraries, Gibsons District Public Library, Sechelt Public Library, and Castlegar Public Library, for a total of 24 libraries on a shared catalog.

If you’d like to follow along as libraries join the Evergreen community, you can subscribe to the Equinox press release feed, which will announce most known Evergreen implementations (or follow the Facebook group mentioned above). The Equinox press release feed was recently tweaked to make it easier to track and share the releases.

Newsletter Administrivia

Feel free to forward, share, etc.! The co-wranglers for this newsletter (produced every month… sometimes earlier, sometimes later… what can we say!) are Karen Schneider, Equinox Community Librarian and John Fink, Digital Technologies Development Librarian at McMaster University.

High-level preliminary assessment from Evergreen Documentation Survey

Karen G. Schneider, Equinox Software, and Karen Collier, Kent County (Md.) Library

September, 2009

Recommendation

The needs assessment group of the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group (DIG) recommends that activities to produce single-source, XML-based project-wide Evergreen documentation commence immediately in these four areas: reports; installation, upgrading, and migrations; cataloging; and circulation. (Note: the DIG concurred at the September 9 meeting, and work has commenced.)

Discussion

The needs assessment functional workgroup of the Evergreen Documentation Group designed, tested, and then conducted a survey from August 12 through August 20, 2009. This was a wide-open survey, with no limits on who could respond, and was intended to be useful but not scientifically rigorous.

The survey had a predictably strong response in the first 24 hours after its announcement, typical of most online surveys, with 84 responses accrued within the first four days—a realistic and useful response rate. The following Monday, August 17, after another survey reminder, the survey experienced an unusually strong spike in response rates.

This second wave of responses, combined with other indicators, suggest that there may have been some “survey-loading” to ensure varied demographics were represented. This was actually not discouraged, and overall, these responses tend to cancel one another out. However, in some cases we took the “pre-wave” data (the 84 responses received before August 17) and give it further manipulation, then compared results. We also took a quick look at crosstabbed results, such as by status with Evergreen (running live, preparing to migrate, testing, actively evaluating, or considering).

Narrative Review of Responses

Responses: 273; 222 completed all applicable questions, for a completion rate of over 81%. Most respondents completed most of the questions (a more meaningful measure, since none of the questions were mandatory).

73% of respondents reported that they worked in a public library. Over 10% of respondents work in a library consortium. Respondents in academic and public libraries were asked to identify their library’s size. 45.7% said “medium,” though large libraries were almost 15% of the responses.

We encouraged a broadly representative response, which is what we got to the question, “What are your roles in your organization?” The top responses were from library circulation (48%), followed by administration (43%), cataloging and training (each 40%), but responses came from all over the spectrum — not only the 12 identified areas, but over 2 dozen other roles as well, from pages to outreach librarians to project managers.

Over 100 respondents were also in some technical role, such as system administration, technical support, or development. 91 respondents claimed to work in system administration (39 prior to 8/17).

Four out of five respondents were from organizations actively running Evergreen or preparing to migrate their first libraries. For those libraries running Evergreen, over 70% had been running Evergreen less than one year.

Priorities for Evergreen Documentation

Overall, 79% of respondents thought version 1.6 (versus earlier versions such as 1.4 or 1.2) should be the highest priority for centralized, Evergreen-wide documentation efforts. This did not significantly shift when compared by role.

Based on all responses, the top six priorities for first topics for Evergreen-wide documentation are:

Circulation 71.8% (153)
Cataloging 59.1% (123)
Reports 58.8% (120)
Installing, upgrading, migrating 50.5% (99)
Local administration 50.2% (102)
System administration 46.8% (94)

Based on the 84 responses received before August 13, the priorities are similar in most areas:

Installing, upgrading, migrating 69.8% (44)
Circulation 57.4% (39)
Local administration 58.5% (38)
System administration 63.1% (41)
Reports 52.3% (120)
Cataloging 51.5% (34)

The key point is that there were no drop-offs—all six topics remained the highest priorities, pointing to a clear mandate for practical, field-oriented documentation. (For example, there had been discussion in the community that online help in the OPAC may be a high priority, but this is not indicated as a high priority by the survey results.)

Furthermore, when results were crosstabbed with the respondent’s role, there were some predictable fluctuations. Migration was a high priority for close to 90% of those migrating to or running a test instance of Evergreen, while only a high priority of 50% of circulation staff.

Meanwhile, reports documentation was a high priority for 73.9% of respondents reporting that they were in libraries running Evergreen live in production, where presumably there is always a real-world need for running and manipulating reports, but for only 14.3% of respondents “actively evaluating Evergreen.”

Formats for documentation

Priorities were at 68.2% each for Web-based online documents and PDFs (over 90% for libraries running a test instance or actively evaluating Evergreen).

Overall, nearly half of all respondents (48%) indicated they would like to see context-sensitive help in the staff client, though this fluctuated widely by status with Evergreen, with a low of 42.9% from libraries running Evergreen to a high of 72.7% for libraries either actively evaluating or considering Evergreen.

On languages for documentation, 76.7% indicated a need for Spanish, while 20% asked for French, and Czech and Armenian received some votes as well.

The following question was based on the results of a (unanimous) vote at the Documentation Interest Group founding meeting in May, 2009: “We are considering implementing the ability for registered users to add comments to each section of the central online version of the documentation. How important is this feature?”

For the total survey, 21.1% (47) replied “Absolutely, please make this happen”; 64.6% (144) identified it as “A nice feature, when you can get around to it”; and 14.3% (32) indicated it was “not that important.”

The comment feature was rated even more highly by the early, pre-8/17 group; of them, 36.5% said “please make it happen,” and fewer than 5 percent thought it was “not that important.” This again fluctuated by status. 52% of the respondents from libraries running Evergreen rated this a “nice feature,” compared to 66.7% for libraries preparing to migrate and 81.8% for libraries actively evaluating Evergreen.

More Documentation Lurking in the Wild?

35 respondents indicated they had local documentation they would be willing to share with the Evergreen project (that had not been shared in the past), with responses in every category, ranging from web developers’ references to sysadmin and circulation. Their responses will be filtered against the contact information they provided in the survey.

Moving Forward

Finally, the best advice the DIG got was in one of the 39 responses in the final comments section: “Soldier on!”

The Evergreen development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Evergreen 1.6.0.0RC1.

1.6.0.0RC1 is a release candidate and while we encourage the entire community to download this version in order to test, we do not endorse putting 1.6.0.0RC1 directly into production. The bug reporting window for 1.6.0.0RC1 will open on September 14, 2009 and close on October 2, 2009.

For general community members reporting bugs, please send them to the development mailing list and include “bug” and “1.6.0.0RC1” somewhere in the subject.  If you have a support contract with an Evergreen vendor, please submit any bug reports through your normal support channels.  Assuming no critical bugs are discovered, we hope to have the supported release of the final version of 1.6 available by October 12, 2009.

Release Candidate 1.6.0.0RC1 includes the 13 bug fixes and 8 new features from 1.4.0.6. It also includes 18 new features including formal support for IE8, Google Book Preview support, RefWorks export capability, more staff client and admin configurability, and a preview of the Acquisitions interface. The building blocks of the forthcoming Acquisitions functionality can be previewed in 1.6.0.0RC1 and includes manual funding management, PO creation, cataloging and receiving processes. These are functional but are not intended for insertion into current work flow scenarios. This feature was specifically included to solicit feedback from the community on this important feature.

See the release notes for all bug fixes and new features.

As always we would like to express our deepest thanks to everyone in the Evergreen community who contributes documentation, patches, bug reports, and ideas, and lends their voices to the project. You all help make Evergreen a far stronger library system than it could ever be without you.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Evergreen!

Evergreen celebrated its third birthday on September 5, 2009. We are marking that anniversary with reflections from the community and, in a separate post, a special Evergreen Index.

Evergreen happened because visionary people believed that libraries deserved good software they could control — software in the public’s trust. Lamar Veatch, Georgia State Librarian, said, “Maybe I was naïve, but I felt like it was in good hands, and I had the confidence in those guys.”

One reason Georgia Public Library Service chose to develop Evergreen–and make it open source–was their frustration with the proprietary software marketplace. Lamar commented, “I felt like we didn’t have any other option. There was no other place to go but try this. Everyone was very excited about the concept of having control over the software, setting our own course, and not having to rely on whatever the commercial sector had available.”

(Also see this video of Lamar’s opening remarks from the 2009 Evergreen International Conference.)

Outside GPLS, some viewed the Evergreen project with skepticism. “I’m proud of taking a risk,” said Julie Walker, Deputy State Librarian for Georgia. “Librarians as a profession are not known for risky behavior, and I think a state library in particular may not be apt to take the road less traveled. Making that leap to try something out of the ordinary, not allowing the naysayers to slow us down, makes me proud to be a librarian from Georgia. I think every PINES library staff member in Georgia should take a moment to bask in the success that is Evergreen.”

Elizabeth McKinney, PINES Program Director, noted, “We never imagined the level of interest the library community would have in an open source project like Evergreen. The library community was watching and waiting for us to go live on Day 1. We have been contacted for information from libraries around the world. It far exceeds any of our expectations.”

David Singleton, former Deputy State Librarian for Georgia, added, “I remember thinking that we had done an amazing thing that would have a ripple effect in the library community for years to come. Many people thought we were crazy for trying to create an open source ILS. What they didn’t know, and I did, is that we had an exceptional team of people committed to the project.”

Evergreen was not just a flash in the pan, David continued. “When strong partners from British Columbia, the University of Windsor, Laurentian University, and others stepped forward, representing a broad spectrum of public, academic, and school libraries, I felt that Evergreen’s potential was limitless. That has continued as consortia and individual libraries have embraced Evergreen over the last few years.”

When asked about what he would like to see in Evergreen’s near future, David replied, “The creation of an Evergreen Foundation for the long-term support and development of the software has been a long-time goal and would be a major step forward.”

Andrea Buntz Neiman and Karen Collier of Kent County Public Library shared their birthday wishes: “As the smallest public library in Maryland, we have to be creative with our budget and our technology.  Once we learned about Evergreen we were thrilled that there was an ideal solution for us!   We have been live since June 2008 and couldn’t be happier.  Evergreen is a great system for public libraries, and open source shares many ideals and values with public libraries.  We are proud to be the first Evergreen public library in Maryland and look forward to celebrating many more Evergreen birthdays!”

You are invited to share more memories on this post!

This Evergreen Index (with apologies to Harper’s Index) was created in honor of Evergreen’s third birthday, September 5, 2009. Feel free to use the comments field to add your own “Evergreen Index” memories, and also see this blog post with commemorative comments from key people Present at the Creation.

Note: because Evergreen is open source—free to download, free to use—actual statistics for Evergreen are at best estimates.

All calculations as of August, 2009.

The September, 2009 Evergreen Index

Libraries known to run Evergreen as of September 5, 2006: 248

Libraries known to run Evergreen as of September 5, 2009: 454

Weddings among Evergreen instructors since September 5, 2009: 1

Country of wedding: Czechoslovakia

Children known to have been born to Evergreen developers since September 5, 2006: 4

Employees at Equinox Software in 2007: 4

Employees at Equinox Software in 2009: 20

Number of major Evergreen releases since September 5, 2006: 6

Total lines of code written for Evergreen, including OpenSRF, as estimated with  SLOCCount: 118,364

Number of languages used in Evergreen code: 6

Language found most often: Perl (56,344 lines of code, or 47.60%)

Type libraries running Evergreen in 2006: 1 (Public)

Type libraries running Evergreen in 2009: 4+ (Public, Academic, Special, School, Tribal)

Countries believed to have at least one library running Evergreen in a live production environment: 7

Holdings, inclusive of book and serial volumes, of largest known public and academic Evergreen libraries: Grand Rapids Public Library (1,130,202); University of Windsor (1,373,197)

Known Evergreen library farthest from the state of Georgia: Mahatma Education Society, Maharashtra, India

Number of vendors known to offer Evergreen services: 6

Number of editors on the Evergreen wiki: 110

Projected and actual attendance for the first-ever Evergreen Conference, held May 2009: 150, 155

Available languages when Evergreen went live: 1 (English)

Known language translations available for Evergreen in 2009: 5 (U.S. English, Canadian English, Canadian French, Armenian, and Czech), plus a partial Chinese translation

Smallest known population served of all known Evergreen public libraries: Alert Bay, British Columbia (population served: 629)

Total population served of all known Evergreen public libraries: 6,088,151

The Evergreen development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Evergreen 1.4.0.6.

Release 1.4.0.6 adds 13 bug fixes and 8 new features to Evergreen, from pop-up context menus for the MARC editor to a crucial bug fix for an issue with renewing multiple items.

See the release notes for all bug fixes and new features.

Our deepest thanks to everyone in the Evergreen community who contributes documentation, patches, bug reports, and ideas, and lends their voices to the project. Special thanks to James Fournier of Sitka for his patch to address copy information displaying incorrectly if the organizational hierarchy was more than three levels deep.  You all help make Evergreen a far stronger library system than it could ever be without you.

Let us also welcome Grace Dunbar, who has joined Equinox Software as the Project Manager for Product Development. This was the first Evergreen release she has participated in, and we are delighted to have her aboard!

Amway Grand Plaza, Grand Rapids

The Evergreen 2010 Site Nomination Committee is pleased to announce that we have made TWO selections.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the heart of an Evergreen state, will be the site for the Evergreen 2010 conference, to be held April 21-23, 2010 at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, a lovely four-star hotel with exceptionally good room rates in a great downtown district with piano bars, fine dining, and interesting things to see and do.

Austin, Texas has been tapped as the potential site for Evergreen 2011 (and Texas will soon be an Evergreen state, too!).

Please welcome your Evergreen 2010 International Conference committee:

Bill Ott, Information Systems Manager
Michele Montague, Technical Services Supervisor
Elaine Bosch, Circulation Manager
Marla Ehlers, Assistant Library Director
Kristen Krueger-Corrado, Marketing and Communications Manager
Dawn Roberts, Equinox Software
Karen G. Schneider, Equinox Software

A heartfelt thanks to the Evergreen 2010 Site Nomination Committee (which is staying in place through early fall to see us through the 2011 selection and contract process):

Jennifer Bielewski, Lyrasis
Andrea Buntz-Neiman, Kent County Library
Deanna Frazee, Killeen City Library System, Texas
Ben Hyman, SITKA
Dawn Roberts, Equinox Software
Karen Schneider, Equinox Software
Cythnia Williamson, Mohawk College, Ontario

Note that it is not too early to be thinking about volunteering for the 2012/2013 site selection process — 18 – 24 months out is an excellent timeframe for considering conference sites.

The newsletter for Evergreen open source library software

Volume 2, Issue 7 — August, 2009

As a reminder, we will also post this newsletter to the Evergreen general discussion list.  Cross-posting and forwarding is encouraged.

In This Issue…

Evergreen Out and About, Evergreen Documentation Survey Needs Your Help, Evergreen Development Update, Evergreen People, Lyrasis Evergreen Classes, New Evergreen Libraries, Newsletter Administrivia
Out and About: An Evergreen Calendar

ALA Annual 2009 — a good time was had by all! This photo is of Matt Carlson of King County Library System, at the Open Source Unconference held during ALA.

The one tidbit in this nicely quiet summer month is that the dates for the next international Evergreen conference have been set: April 21 -23, 2010. Watch for a site announcement shortly–the site nomination committee has been hard at work!

If you have Evergreen-related events to add (talks, conferences, etc.), just email events@evergreen-ils.org.

Documentation Interest Group: Please Take the Survey NLT August 20!

Please help the Evergreen project by taking the documentation needs assessment survey no later than Thursday, August 20, 2009.

This survey will help the Evergreen project prioritize and plan its activities. You are welcome to take the survey no matter what your role is in your organization or where you are in your Evergreen journey.

The Evergreen DIG (Documentation Interest Group) has made terrific strides since forming in late May and committing to single-source, XML-based documentation. Some of the highlights of this group’s activity include a gorgeous proof of concept, a thorough environmental scan of existing documentation, careful attention to the group’s scope and mission, and, in work, the all-important style guide.

Come on board–there’s room for many-a-more! Email docs@evergreen-ils.org for more info.

Webinar: Evergreen ILS and MARC Format for Holdings Data (MFHD)

David J. Fiander, Web Services Librarian, University of Western Ontario, did an outstanding job. For those who couldn’t attend, the webinar was recorded.

Evergreen Development Update

Evergreen 1.4.0.6 is due out shortly, and should introduce a few bug fixes.

See the Evergreen Roadmap for a full list of enhancements in 1.6, due out soon, and for a top-level view of what’s coming in 2.0.

Evergreen People

VOWS: When the academic year ended at Charles University in Prague, Linda Skolkova and Vaclav Jansa, who taught the Evergreen course at the Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship, could finally find some spare time… to get married! They said their I do’s on July 18 at the New Town Hall in Prague. You are welcome to virtually join the ceremony and subsequent celebration. The happy couple will resume Evergreen-related instruction this fall.

HIRES: Equinox Software Inc., “The Evergreen Experts,” recently hired Galen Charlton as Vice President for Data Services and Dave Brown as sysadmin. Charlton is a skilled developer and data migration specialist who in his decade in the industry has led developers and data specialists through hundreds of successful data migrations, has contributed his development acumen to thousands of lines of code, and has guided libraries through numerous successful development projects. Brown brings over 15 years of IT experience, most recently as Library Systems Manager for the Mayo Clinic.

California: Workshops on Open Source

If you were at the Evergreen conference this spring, you might have had a chance to experience a fun, engaging program based on a half-day workshop by The Open Source Open Libraries Consortium of California, a group that is working hard to bring awareness of open source library system software to libraries in their state. In the workshop, Lori Ayre (library technology consultant with The Galecia Group) and Cheryl Gould (training faciliator with Fully Engaged Libraries) combine exercises and activities that engage and energize the participates while teaching them about open source software–what it is, how it is licensed, and why it makes so much sense for libraries. Check them out!

Lyrasis Evergreen Training Classes

Lyrasis is offering an Evergreen Cataloging Class 8/19 at 2pm EST. To register please see the Lyrasis website

Planet Evergreen

Can’t get enough news about Evergreen open source software? Subscribe to or read Planet Evergreen, an aggregator for Evergreen-related posts, at http://planet.evergreen-ils.org . 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

Evergreen on Facebook

Evergreen has a growing Facebook group. We post events to this group as well as press releases for new Evergreen libraries and systems and other related news. The group now has over 300 members.

A Few Reminders

Webinars and videos: Don’t forget the section on the Evergreen wiki devoted to community-contributed documentation and tutorials.

Evergreen also has a Flickr set.

New Evergreen Libraries: Welcome Aboard!

Also see the growing list of Evergreen libraries.

This list is open to all Evergreen libraries, from commercially-supported to “grow-your-own.” Please add your library if it’s not there! All community members are welcome to have wiki logins.

Highlights from the latest additions:

Sitka in British Columbia just rolled out two more libraries, Alert Bay Public Library and College of the Rockies, for a total of 21 libraries on a shared catalog.

The Haines (Alaska) library catalog is part of a cooperative partnership among the public library, the Haines Elementary Media Center, the Haines High School Library, and the Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center.

Evergreen Indiana now has 37 libraries live on its shared catalog, including Shoals Public Library—the first previously non-automated library to join Evergreen Indiana—as well as Andrews Dallas Township, Loogootee, Middletown Fall Creek, Milford, Washington Public Township, Waterloo Grant Township, Pike County, Alexandria-Monroe, Kendalville & Limberlost Public Libraries.

Newsletter Administrivia

Feel free to forward, share, etc.!

The co-wranglers for this newsletter (produced every month… sometimes earlier, sometimes later… what can we say!) are Karen Schneider, Equinox Community Librarian and John Fink, Digital Technologies Development Librarian at McMaster University.

The Evergreen Documentation Interest Group needs your input to help prioritize its activities for the next few months. Please take the following survey and share it widely. We are casting a wide net — we want input from as many roles as possible, from project coordinators to people working the front lines in libraries, and whether you are just thinking about Evergreen or running it since Day 1.

Responses are due no later than 5 p.m. ET Thursday, August 20, 2009. The survey is short and easy to complete.

You are encouraged to forward this to interested communities.

Thanks much on behalf of the Evergreen DIG!