[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Improving Evergreen's OPAC Search

[Galen Charlton]

Hi Chad,

On Jan 12, 2010, at 10:52 AM, Chad G. Hansen wrote:
> Is this the current development community of Evergreen? Is this even the mailing list for those who are actively working on Evergreen?

To confirm, you have indeed found the correct mailing list: There Be Evergreen Developers Here!

> What we are looking for is an endorement by the Evergreen development community of the idea. A willingness for someone in the development community to possibly work with us in our attempt to potentially improve Evergreen's search.
> Our goal is to work with the development community to implement any improvements we can and then give what we have done to the community (we have no desire to maintain after the 3 year grant project is up).

> Is this the right venue for this request?
> What is the concensus from this group?
> Do you need more information before commiting to endoring the idea to possibly work with us in the future (assuming our grant is granted)?

Certainly, I think we're all open to any thoughts and, better yet, working code towards improving any and all aspects of Evergreen, including OPAC search.  However, I think you may be making an assumption about how the Evergreen developers operate.  You need no endorsement from anybody at all to hack on Evergreen; in a very real sense, everybody and nobody is empowered to make the kind of endorsement you are seeking.  Here you go: go forth and hack!  Less flippantly, for what it's worth, I personally approve of any effort to improve library discovery search systems by careful research and the creation of concrete, working implementations of new search algorithms or techniques.  But that's just me - I am not the voice of Evergreen.

If your research ends up producing a search subsystem that is an improvement over what Evergreen currently has, I'm sure that it will be happily accepted, either in the Evergreen trunk or possibly as an alternative search module.  You can also be assured that there will be people here on the mailing list and on the #evergreen IRC channel who will, time permitting, be available to bounce ideas off of or to do some testing.  However, I think it's accurate to say that most of the developers here have a strong preference for dealing with working code, and it is premature to expect that we would arrive any consensus on any technical matter without your having a concrete implementation for us to look at, or at least the backbone of it.

If you can tell us more about what you may need for your grant application, we may be able to offer suggestions.  If you are concerned about the long-term sustainability of what you produce, I can offer two answers.  First, as I said, if you create something that is a clear improvement, you can reasonably expect to have it accepted on its merits - but be prepared to advocate for it!  Second, the Evergreen project does maintain an area for contributed modules, so if nothing else, what you create can live on as a contrib to be taken up, or not, by other Evergreen users.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 352-215-7548
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/


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ALA MidWinter
January 15-18, 2010
booth # 2064