[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Acquisitions and Serial timeline

[arhyno at uwindsor.ca]

Hi Pierre,

I think I have a spreadsheet I can send you, there's also some postings to 
the list on resources, for example here:

http://list.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/2007-June/001314.html

Bill Erickson has given some full time attention to acq/ser in September 
and this month (Bill is probably worth a dozen developers and deftly 
navigated the hooks to Evergreen), and we have had some small contracts, 
but Windsor is not even remotely in a position to dedicate full time 
developers to this project, at least not yet. I suspect an ILS vendor 
would tell you, or at least their developers would tell you, that they 
tend to throw more resources into acq/ser than any other part of the 
system, and my contention has been that it makes more sense to use the 
financials from an existing ERP application than to create these from 
scratch. I have seen the incredible overhead that building things like 
general ledgers can cause in at least 4 systems now in 2 decades. So the 
ERP approach has been taken but ERP implementations are not necessarily 
small undertakings either, and the metric I would use for comparison is 
something akin to putting ERP in place, though maybe not with overhead of 
something as elaborate as say, Peoplesoft.

On paper, I am now at 20% for my time allotment for Evergreen, this is 
recent, was much delayed, and may not sound like much, but it is like a 
gift falling from the sky in our environment. Windsor was an original Beta 
partner for Notis Horizon way back in the early 1990s and the fallout from 
when that project was unexpectedly terminated still haunts us on making 
ILS commitments (it also wiped out about a year and a half of my working 
life in one single event). It took no less than 18 months for closure on 
the decision for the commercial system we have now, and we are working 
towards Evergreen within a lot of constraints. Of course, I give every 
other minute outside of my work time that I can, but I also own a 111 year 
old newspaper business and have employees and publishing deadlines to 
worry about, so there are no shortage of things competing for other time. 
Still, I pushed for an institutional commitment to at least the acq/ser 
side of Evergreen because I fundamentally believe that Evergreen is the 
most important thing to happen to libraries in a decade, and what I have 
is the best I can do at this point. 

It would probably be the easiest for me to send you a zipped file of 
what's described in the wiki, all I would need is some connection info for 
your instance of Evergreen. I have to finish the description of the 
current functions, which I hope to do tonight, and then move the pieces 
from my laptop to the demo server, but Tuesday is the day we go to press 
and it tends to be absolutely insane, so this may not happen until 
Wednesday. I think we are in a position to open this up to more hands, 
that's been very tricky to until just recently because there was so much 
mapping to do around ERP. Believe me, the situation that needs to be in 
place is for me to be out of the way so that the vastly more prolific 
Evergreen crew can continue to make magic, and we are close to making that 
happen. 

art
---
Art Rhyno
Systems Librarian
University of Windsor Libraries
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