[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Acquisitions and Serial timeline

Tue Oct 30 13:33:18 EDT 2007

Hi Art,

Thanks for your detail response. I understand that you and your team are probably extremely busy at this time, so, again, thanks a lot.

You mentioned that you may have a spreadsheet containing information on the development effort. If, by any chance, you have it at hand, I would certainly be interested to consult it. 

For the Alpha version of Acq/Serials, just tell me what kind of information you need for our test instance of Evergreen.

Regards,

_________________________________________________________

Pierre Roberge

Directeur des technologies de l'information

Service des bibliothèques

Université du Québec à Montréal

Case postale 8889, succ. Centre-Ville

Montréal, Qc

H3C 3P3

Téléphone: 514-987-3000 #3163

Télécopieur: 514-987-0285

Courriel: roberge.pierre at uqam.ca <mailto:roberge.pierre at uqam.ca> 

________________________________

De : open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] De la part de arhyno at uwindsor.ca
Envoyé : 29 octobre 2007 19:14
À : open-ils-dev at list.georgialibraries.org
Objet : RE: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] Acquisitions and Serial timeline

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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