by That’s right, folks. We’re only two weeks away from the PINES consortium migrating to the Evergreen ILS. Two weeks. It’s hard to believe.
Someone dropped me an email yesterday and mentioned that there hasn’t been any recent activity on this blog. Yeah… sorry about that, but things have been very busy internally (as any PINES library staff member will tell you). Over the past month, PINES central staff have travelled all over the state training hundreds of library staff on the software. The development team has been extremely busy making last-minute tweaks, fixing bugs, bringing up and configuring the production hardware, and performing dry runs of the data translation and load.
We’re ready, and all systems are go.
Good luck! Hope all goes smoothly.
There are a lot of us pulling for you out here!
I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to thank you for being willing to take this step to help push the library business into the 21st century.
Congratulations! I remember when I came across the Evergreen project about 2-3 months pre-alpha. I was looking for a free ILS/LMS, and decided to go Open-Source (I’ve always been a fan!). I already had experience with the other top Open-Source ILS softwares, but I felt they didn’t meet my wants (mostly was locale issues and multi-branch issues), or they were no longer free (as in free beer, as Richard Stallman [I believe] puts it).
I then came across a report about Open-Source ILS’s, and included in it was Evergreen. So I explored it. I was in love! Other Open-Source ILS’s were really designed to be used by a single library (some with multiple branches, but still one library). There are other free non-opensource solutions I came across that were similar in this area.
Evergreen is different. Right from the beginning, it was designed for a large consortium and to US locales. Also, it can be used through the Internet in a secure manner (not requiring expensive Point-to-Point lines or VPN). It uses proven free open-source technologies and abides by library standards. In almost every option I can think of, Evergreen exceeds its “competitors” (both open-source and commercial). Granted there are some features that wont be in it in V 1.0, but they are in the works!
The domain name Evergreen has (open-ils.org) is correct. I have absolutely no doubt that in its first year, it will exceed all previous deployments of open-source ILS/LMS’s. There is finally a free/open alternative to expensive commercial solutions!
Good luck in your deployment. I look forward to reading all about it! I have no doubt in my mind that it will go smoothly (the only hickups I would expect are conversion issues that are pretty much beyond your control).
–Don
Best wishes…
Despite our organization’s commitment to one of the “big 4” ILS vendors (sigh..), there are indeed many of us out there wishing for the best success with these open ILS options and searching for ways we can get our organizations out of our “vendor lock up”.
Watching this closely..