Evergreen and Small Libraries

Kent County’s Quest, or, The Evergreen Fairytale

• Karen Collier, Public Services Librarian
• Andrea 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, [e-mail]
• Andrea Buntz Neiman, [e-mail]

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