Evergreen at 5

Happy Birthday, Evergreen!

Tuesday, September 6, was the beginning of Evergreen’s sixth year. (Evergreen’s anniversary is calculated as the day after the U.S. Labor Day in early September. The PINES library consortium was the first implementation of Evergreen and it went live on that day in 2006.) What follows are summary tables of libraries migrating to Evergreen over those years. They provide quiet testimony to the growth of Evergreen and hint at the rich community which has formed around it.

For those new to Evergreen, there is not yet an organized history of Evergreen but there are a number of available sources of information. A good start to those sources with links is available in the Evergreen entry in the Open Source ILS Glossary.

A few observations.

1. Note that the Evergreen community welcomed its 1,000th library when the Buncombe County Public Libraries joined the NC Cardinal system. Asheville, North Carolina is the county seat of Buncombe County. There are 13 branches in the system.
2. And we have a winner in our contest to guess the date for the migration of the 1,000th library. It appears that Anoop Atre had the closest guess for that date. He guessed the migration of the 1,000th library would be on August 31, 2011 just missing the threshold migration date of September 2, 2011.
3. Sitka was the first consortium outside of Georgia to migrate libraries to Evergreen when it migrated the Prince Rupert Library in Prince Rupert, British Columbia in November, 2007. Sitka just added its 50th system, the Beaver Valley Public Library in Fruitvale, BC. Make sure to click on the link and see the best library picture you will see in a long time: "Literacy begins early." Indeed.
4. It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that can certainly be said of the Evergreen community. Evergreen Indiana celebrated its third birthday on August 25th. In those three short years, Evergreen Indiana has grown to 90 library systems with 130 separate outlets. In addition to its public library members, it has added two K12 libraries.
5. There were several large migrations in this 5th year. It appears that the largest single migration was one that took place in June when 50 library systems in Bibliomation joined BibliOak. BibliOak has had several separate migrations in the process of constructing its multi-type library network in Connecticut. Merrimack Valley Library Consortium migrated 35 public library systems to Evergreen.

Public libraries are still the predominate type of library running Evergreen but note the change in K12 libraries. In fact, the first migrations of Evergreen’s Year 6 resulted in 17 more K12 libraries being added to Bibliomation’s BibliOak consortium—these libraries are not included in the totals in this table. They would have migrated earlier but for the fact that Hurricane Irene decided to pay a visit to Connecticut resulting in power failures and the closure of schools.

In the last year, seven consortia have joined the Evergreen community:

• The Maine Balsam Library Consortium
• OWWL a project of the Pioneer Library System in New York
• The Sage Library System of Eastern Oregon
• Skagit Evergreen Libraries in Skagit County, Washington
• Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC) the first of the Massachusetts systems to migrate to Evergreen.
• And NC Cardinal—a project of the North Carolina State Library—and our newest.
• Libraries in the Republic of Georgia also migrated to Evergreen. These were the first libraries outside of North America that run Evergreen and have a public OPAC visible the Web.

All indications are that this next year will continue to see rapid growth in the number and breadth of Evergreen libraries. We can also expect to see Evergreen libraries in at least three European countries where work on implementations is ongoing.

Bob Molyneux