Evergreen – the Open Source Catalogue

John Fink from McMaster presents the ups and downs of going with an open source catalogue.

He starts off with a little history.  “Library catalogues were the crowning jewel of libraries in the mid nineties.   Everything the library did went through the catalogue.”

Since this time, new stuff has come into view, the Internet, Amazon and many other places to get information.  ILS (Integrated Library System) marketplace has seen a lot of mergers and buyouts in recent years.

McMaster used Horizon and in spring 2007 when they learned that SirsiDynix was no longer going to support horizon.

They had a few options

1) move to unicorn

2) buy another ILS (Triple I possiby?)

3) do something else

John sees further stratification of ILS products in commercial and open source markets.

Why have an Open source ILS

• Price
• Ownership – a company can’t tell you that you can no longer use it (i.e. horizon)
• Legal and Technical ability to add features and expand capabilities

Koha and Evergreen are two major open source ILS systems.

Evergreen started in Georgia to replace an ILS system.  It uses IM messaging interface to speak to ILS engine.

Support models risks?

Many organizations feel that a support mode provides security to their organization.   Evergreen are responsive through mailing lists etc. and original developers of Evergreen have created a company to provide support – support can be provided service only companies.

Why not Evergreen?

It comes from a public sphere (academic angle is lacking).  It lacks reserves, acquisions, seriels, recalls

• not feature rich at the moment
• data migration is clunky (command line to convert stuff to sql) – not friendly on the backend – and therefore will not be helpful to the average ‘cataloger’ – summer 08 exected release of first gui of back end
• difficult install process

Some good sounding things though…

• json and xml are used to get at the data
• REST like API

Early days on this – I will have to keep tabs on it.