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

[Joe Atzberger]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Chad G. Hansen <cgh at byu.edu> wrote:

> Is this the current development community of Evergreen? Is this even the
> mailing list for those who are actively working on Evergreen?
>

Yes it is, and we are.


> My group is submitting a proposal for a grant that will hopefully allow us
> to implement our new search technology with one of the existing open source
> ILS that are being used around the world. We would like to work with
> Evergreen to see if we can improve its OPAC search with ideas or features
> from our own system. We are just in the proposal phase right now. Attached
> is a portion of a previously rejected proposal. The section attached is our
> previous design/plan section for what we would like to accomplish.
>
> 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)?
>

This is the right audience.  In general, I expect any developer would be
pleased to see a well-funded initiative begin contributing code and new
developers to their project.  LibraryThing integration, specifically, would
be sweet.  However, it is customary to begin one's contributions to a
project with smaller pieces of functionality and bugfixes, rather than the
ambitious formal project you have outlined.  I'm not saying that you have to
do that, just that it is that type of thing that demonstrates familiarity
with the codebase and would make the larger project seem more feasible.

Speaking only for myself, my fear would be that the project might be
cumbersome and academic, taking a long time to work on great ideas, but
producing little real benefit to EG users.  That's just not the kind of
development that I am used to.

You would probably be well served to draft a document declaring the current
state of searching in EG, noting the degree to which it satisfies or does
not satisfy your design criteria.  As far as your design criteria go, EG
uses Postgres not MySQL.  That is unlikely to change in the foreseeable
future, so you might have to adapt portions of your proposal.

--Joe Atzberger
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