A Day with Equinox: Evergreen Exploration

We'll be spending some time over the next few months to investigate the consortial functionality of Evergreen.

We're starting with a day-long session with Shae Tetterton, project manager at Equinox, the support vendor for Evergreen software development, implementation, and hosting services.

We've sent Shae some of our current functionality needs as well as some wish list items and she plans to touch upon these areas in her demonstration of the Evergreen software.

In the meantime, Melissa, here at work, is VERY close to bringing up our first Evergreen test server - NOT an easy task.

Shae will be here tomorrow as long as the weather cooperates!

Open Source Systems and Risk Management

Here's a general article in LJ about the importance of assessing your risk before you take on an open source ILS system:

It's an interesting read and very timely:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6611591.html

Evergreen v. Koha - Comparisons

I've been looking for posts comparing Evergreen to Koha and I'm not finding much. Some posts are old and no longer accurate. Very frustrating.

Here's one from an Evergreen user in the making:
http://kcplinnovations.blogspot.com/2007/11/comparing-evergreen-and-koha.html

and here is a basic comparison between the two by Josh Ferraro, from LibLime, who is very familiar with both systems, since LibLime at one time offered Evergreen hosting/support:

http://markmail.org/message/ajr432cbothuf2ey

I'm sure that there are plenty more posts worth reading out there. If anyone has any good comparison articles or blogs or what not, please feel free to share!

Darien Library's Social OPAC (SOPAC 2.0)

On September 1st, John Blyberg launched his social OPAC at the Darien Public Library. This revamped OPAC front-end includes a number of web 2.o features like:

• user-added ratings, comments, and reviews
• ability for libraries to add community repository data

This OPAC front-end software has been released as open source and should work with a number of ILSes out there.

To experience SOPAC 2.0, for yourself, go to:
http://www.darienlibrary.org/catalog

Chrome - Google's New Web Browser

In case you haven't heard, Google has developed their own web browser and it is open source.

It's in beta at the moment. To read about it, see the Google Blog post:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

-Amy

LibLime Scope of Work - Enhancements List

An update on our work with LibLime:

We received the summary of enhancements that the LibLime team identified during our two-day scope of work study with them. Bibliomation staff has gone through the document to clarify some of the functionality descriptions and to make sure that all needed enhancements were included in the document as well as those items that were more "wish list" items and wouldn't be needed on Day 1 of a cutover to Koha.

Next steps:
LibLime will refine this enhancements list and send us the refined document. Bibliomation staff will then need to prioritize the list and return to LibLime. LibLime will then cost out the work so that we can see the overall cost of sponsoring Koha development work with LibLime.

For a list of enhancements currently being suggested and considered for the next version of Koha, version 3.2, go to http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:rfcs3.2&do=diff1220032151

Amy

The Day After (The LibLime Visit)

Well, it was a pretty intense two days, but we think we managed to cover all modules and the specifics of our needed functionality with the LibLime folks.

The good news -- much of what we were requesting was already in the works, based on other consortial-sponsored development work. We won't know for sure what we would still need to sponsor until we get the full list from LibLime. They will be asking us to prioritize our development needs and once they have that information, they will be able to spec it out for us and attach dollars to it.

They were also very impressed with our test server installation and the level of configuration work we were already able to figure out on our own. As Brendan tells me, it's amazing what you can figure out when you spend your nights in your basement, pounding away on a server.

I will post more about those areas that still need development once we have the document from LibLime.

Amy