by I am pleased to announce that the University of Windsor has partnered up with the Georgia Public Library Service to work on the Evergreen acquisitions module. Beginning in January 2007, staff from Windsor and GPLS will begin to collaborate on software specifications and development.
A possible building block could be OFBiz, an Open Source ERP application that has almost completed the Apache incubation process, a significant sign of achievement for OSS projects. Although the public side of the ILS has recently received considerable attention from the library community, the possibilities for enhancing some of the lower level processing layers in a library’s operations through OSS are also significant. Representatives from the Georgia Public Library Service recently participated in a symposium on the future of the ILS that was hosted by the University of Windsor, and working together to explore the architecture of a next generation acquisitions system is a strong move toward creating new options for long-standing ILS functions.
Very good move for UWindsor.
Good to see an institution with the smarts put some investment into something with a real future.
This is great news– Evergreen needs a strong support community to move it forward.
Does Windsor have a time table for migrating to Open-ils?
The last time we defined a solid timeline on ILS migrations, we were in the thick of implementing a new client/server system called Horizon from Notis as a beta partner, and went through the whole Ameritech buy-out and plug-pulling era of the early 90s. So time tables might not appear for a while, though all of this now builds on a working system, which was far from the case in the first wave of client/server solutions on the ILS landscape.
Great News !!
As a small university library frustrated with current ILS vendor support and functionality, we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
Suggestion: provide a way for people to donate cash to the development effort – not all libraries have the development staff but may be able to contribute some money towards development of the system. Perhaps a bounty system as is used by many other open source projects.
Suggestions are made on development directions and people can vote for them and pledge cash. Once suitable money is raised for the item the development goes ahead.
Keep up the good work …. finally there is a real alternative emerging for us 🙂
Regards Anthony.
Well done, Art!
Looks like it took me some time to get to know about this but I’m impressed with the progress. People back here have been asking about Evergreen.
Regards
Amos