[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Evergreen maintenance

[Harry Bochner]

Let me step back from the nitty-gritty to get some over-all
guidance.

When I first looked into Evergreen, I saw that it was over-kill for
our needs here: with one small corporate library, we don't need this
much architecture and complexity. It's designed for much more data and
much heavier use than what we need. Extra power isn't bad, but there's
a cost in terms of configuration and maintenance. So I set it aside at
that point.

But after my experiments with Koha left me dissatisfied, I came back
to Evergreen and dug into trying to install it. It's been slow and
painful, though it may yet turn out to be worthwhile.

But my boss raises another issue. Assuming that we get Evergreen up
and running, how much on-going maintenance is it going to need? If the
maintenance is commensurate with the difficulty of installation,
that's not going to work for us. Large libraries of the sort that
Evergreen is intended for can reasonably be expected to devote a
signficant amount of staff time to keeping the cataloging system
purring along smoothly. We can't afford that. If it's going to take
on-going care and feeding, it's not for us.

So before I spend too much more time on the installation phase, I'd
like to get some input on what we might expect the maintenance phase
to look like, once everything is installed and running.

Thanks in advance for any feedback (including, perhaps, less
high-powered packages we might look into).

-- 
Harry
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