[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Joining the Evergreen community

[Olli-Antti Kivilahti]

Hello again Evergreen mailing list!

Just wanted to make a public announcement that the regional library of 
Joensuu has decided to have Evergreen as our ILS-of-choice. We will have 
EG in production by/during the year 2014. It was a tough battle between 
Koha and Evergreen, where according to our requirements specification, 
Evergreen lost by 1 point of 470. Regardless of the much larger 
technical difficulties perceived in adapting, maintaining and developing 
Evergreen, we found the consortial model to be crucial for our library 
needs. Our consortium will include the whole province of North-Carelia 
(ca. 200 000 residents). We have around 20 branches and 4 municipal 
libraries that need to be joined together, with the promises of Southern 
Central Finland joining us with equal amount of branches.
We are already starting the localization process by outsourcing the 
Launchpad translation and aim to complete it by the end of June. 
Hopefully by then our Fenno-American cousins can enjoy their Evergreen 
in Finnish.
Currently the main challenges are to finish with our Software 
Requirements Specification(SRS), which is around 55% complete. Make more 
detailed plans for the database migrations, for which we need to migrate 
three different systems, and have more expertise in understanding the 
Evergreen development workflow. To that end I was planning to 
participate in the Google Summer of Code.
We will host the servers and databases, do the migrations and set up 
Library settings by ourselves.
Community support will however play a critical role with the success of 
our project. And we are willing to pay for it. It is unclear as to what 
extent, but propably will require participation during UTC/GMT +2 
working hours or even moving to Finland. It might be possible to hire a 
Evergreen specialist for the duration of 6 months to 1 year.
We also have plans for Evergreen improvements and would like to discuss 
about how to integrate them to the master branch. We have reserved 
47000€ for the improvement of services and it might be best to start 
thinking ahead on how to implement, and in what timeframe, the changes 
we prioritize, if possible. And possibly make joint efforts with 
existing development teams.
Once the SRS will come closer to completion, I will translate it to 
English and publish it.

-- 
Olli-Antti Kivilahti
Open Library 2013
Library of Joensuu