[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Greetings -- I have a question...

[Kevin Riggle]

I'm not qualified to offer an opinion on the use of Evergreen, but I
will point out two existing things that might fit your needs, if only
for comparison purposes.  (I've used neither of these, nor am I
associated with them in any way -- I just know that they exist.)

LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/) is a Web service which
lets you put your personal library online -- it pulls bibliographic
data out of Amazon, the Library of Congress, and a few other places,
so getting the data into the system is likely much easier for
nontechnical users than with Evergreen.  I'm not sure if it lets you
manage checkouts, however.  It seems to be free up to a certain number
of items entered into the system and then relatively cheap after that,
but each home "library" would likely want its own account.

Delicious Library (http://www.delicious-monster.com/) is a program
which appears to do similar things -- most definitely including
managing checkouts.  It's grabbing cataloging information off the Web
too, so input is nice.  It's Mac-only, as far as I can tell, which
might be a problem.  If each home library needed a Mac and a copy of
the software (maybe you could wrangle an educational discount?), it
would get *expensive*, but if you could do it all from one system it
would be more reasonable.

Good luck!

- Kevin

On 12/29/06, Vic Kelson <vic.kelson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am not from a library, but I am an experienced
> Linux/MySQL/PostgreSQL/Perl/C/Apache person (and the author of a GPL'd
> groundwater flow model code). I'm fascinated by your project. After
> reading about Evergreen, I have an idea for an application that's
> probably outside your experience. Basically, I want to know if this is
> even possible.
>
> Our family lives in Bloomington, IN, a progressive town very similar
> to Athens (we have several good friends in Athens, the "Bloomington of
> the South"). We're also active in our community; I've just been
> elected to local office, and my wife is working on global warming and
> other issues. We have a _lot_ of books and other media in our two-Ph.D
> home, and some months ago my wife started me working on a database of
> all those resources (I've been an SQL admin since the late '80s).
>
> We are members of an eclectic group of home-schoolers, and when my
> wife mentioned that I was building a database, other families were
> immediately interested, and particularly wanted to share resources.
> When I saw the Evergreen software described at LinuxToday, I had an
> idea...
>
> Can we use Evergreen to build a "community library system" of sharable
> resources among a group of interested participants? I envision an
> "interlibrary loan" arrangement between families, as opposed to
> libraries. I've looked at the descriptions and the end-user demo, and
> the whole system looks very promising. I'm sure I have the computer
> skills to deploy the software, and I have access to a place to host a
> server, but I need to know if it's even worth trying:
>
> How hard is it to enter the data? I assume there's an editing facility?
>
> Would I need to deploy multiple instances on multiple servers, or can
> I deploy several "libraries" on a single server? Remember, our
> activity levels will be small, at least initially.
>
> Can a mere mortal like me make this thing work? I'm not a Library
> Science guy, but I have three friends who are, and I'm sure at least
> one of them would be willing to help.
>
> Anyhow, please let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree (wouldn't
> be the first time). If I think big, I can envision a community of
> users, not just our home-school bunch, who are willing to share their
> collections of books and other resources. A distributed community
> library... wouldn't that be great fun?
>
> THANKS for listening! At any rate, your system looks very good -- keep
> up the good work!
> Vic Kelson
>


-- 
Kevin Riggle (kevinr at mit.edu)