[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Enter the Spork

[Mike Rylander]

[Pardon the cross-posting]

Over the last eight months I have been actively working on a new
project for Equinox and under contract from OHIONET[1] called
FulfILLment[2], the goal of which is to create a hybrid
physical/virtual union catalog and ILL system for seamlessly sharing
resources between libraries, regardless of the ILS each library
happens to use.

The thinking behind FulfILLment is simple -- take the power and
scalability of the Evergreen circulation environment, where we have
nearly full a priori knowledge of global system state and strong
algorithms to help get items to patrons, and project that “up” to an
ILL environment which, heretofore, has typically had little global
state information.

Evergreen and FulfILLment have been, at the code level, the same
project thus far.  Many of the recent improvements to Evergreen that
I’ve been involved with can be credited, partially if not completely,
to work on FulfILLment, including in-db ingest and import rulesets,
search speed enhancement, true facets and new features in BibTemplate.
 This symbiotic relationship will, of course, continue because much of
what both systems do is very similar on a high level.

Even accepting that Evergreen and FulfILLment will facilitate similar
ends at the institutions that use them -- specifically, getting items
into the hands of users -- and will share a great deal of internal
code and structure, we’ve now reached a point where the details of
many of the common goals of the two have been tackled.  And so, on
August 2, 2010, Evergreen grew a spork[3].

FulfILLment now has its own identity and will now rise or fall in its
own Subversion repository, on its own server, with its own mailing
lists and (though I hope there will be a lot of crossover) its own
community.

It’s not a f-f-f ... f-f-f ... you know, that f-word, because
FulfILLment will not compete with Evergreen.  They will serve
different purposes and constituencies, and there will always be things
one can do that the other cannot.  And, they will feed (on) each
other, both in terms of specific code and conceptual design, moving
forward.  FulfILLment is, in the best possible sense of the term, a
derivative project based on Evergreen.

So that’s the code part, but Open Source is about the community,
right?  This is an open call to all:  jump right in!  Grab the code
(not much different than trunk Evergreen today, but that will be
changing fast), join the mailing lists (not much traffic, but if you
join then that can change!), hop in the IRC channel (#fulfillment on
FreeNode).  Dip your toe in, ask questions.  This should be a fun ride
-- it was the first time around with Evergreen -- and the more the
merrier.

[1] http://www.ohionet.org
[2] http://blog.esilibrary.com/2008/03/13/the-path-to-fulfillment/
[3] http://fulfillment-ill.org/websvn/listing.php?repname=FulfILLment

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com