[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Late Bloomer

[Lynne Welch]

Heidi - and anyone else who would care to venture an opinion, please do 
chime in!

    Yesterday I attended a meeting of Ohio librarians regarding the 
feasibility of adopting an Open-Source ILS throughout much of the state, 
especially for small to medium-sized libraries affected by the recent 
SIRSI Horizon decision. My question to you-all is:  if the librarians 
got together and prepared a list of must-have's and would-like's, would 
it be feasible for a group of masters-level students and teachers at 
either one or several state-funded universities to collaborate on a 
tweaked version (for example of Evergreen) that would work for various 
sizes of libraries throughout Ohio?

    For example, Kent State offers a partnership program between the 
schools of Library Science and those involved with Business Management 
and Computer Science, leading to an advanced degree in "Information 
Architecture and Knowledge Management" -- what would be the likelihood 
of several classes and faculty working together as a requirement of 
graduation, to maintain, upgrade and monitor developments elsewhere 
vis-a-vis Evergreen? They would get real-life experience, the library 
community would achieve a usable system at a lower cost than paying 
developers (and possibly with the added benefit of knowing that the 
school is not likely to close its doors without sufficient advance 
warning to its clientele) - and since our (the public's) tax dollars pay 
for the schools, the schools could provide a useful service that would 
allow libraries to spend more of their tax dollars on equipment, 
materials, and overhead. A win-win solution, to my way of thinking.

    But since I'm not an academic, and my understanding of the work 
involved in coding is at a minimal level, I wanted to solicit the 
opinion of Those Who Know These Things ;-)      before I propose it to 
our State Librarian and the people at the library school for 
consideration. What do you-all think?

                                                                         
      Lynne
Lynne Welch
Herrick Memorial Library
Wellington OH USA

Heidi (Faculty) Johnson wrote:
> Hello!
> The snow is almost gone and tulips are taking the chance to emerge here
> in northern Minnesota, and I have finally worked up the courage to reply
> to Brad LaJeunesse's request for listserv participants to identify
> themselves. My name is Heidi Johnson, and I am a librarian at The
> College of St. Scholastica. I mainly work with students at the reference
> desk and do class presentations on library resources; however, I am also
> earning my second master's degree in Computer Information Systems. One
> way that these two skill sets intersect is with the OPAC, and I have
> been interested for awhile with how the OPAC can interact more
> effectively with patrons.
>
> In addition, Minnesota colleges and universities have been migrating to
> Aleph, an Ex Libris product, to much disappointment. The final straw
> came several weeks ago when they tweaked adjacent phrase searching to
> include "!0" between terms (for example to search for wild rice together
> as a phrase, the search string would be wild!0rice - now try teaching
> that to a group of freshman! :) Needless to say, PINES is an absolute
> dream, and I have been showing it off every chance I get.
>
> At any rate, the stars aligned for my master's thesis, and I have been
> earnestly studying everything I can about open source and advanced
> database techniques and planning how we might be able to actually adopt
> Evergreen here at our college. My fellow librarians, library director,
> master's advisor, and other groups on campus have shown me much
> encouragement and willingness to help out as time and ability allow. 
>
> In short, I have really enjoyed reading the listserv comments and
> learning from them. I am hoping to contribute in whatever way I can. So
> far (as required of me for my thesis), I have been very thorough in
> project management and systems analysis and depending on how far we are
> able to go, I think other interested libraries could adopt these
> documents and work off of them for their own implementations.
>
> Finally, I am planning a trip to Georgia this summer and would really
> appreciate the chance to meet with people on this project as well as
> interview staff and patrons at a public library. Does anyone know how I
> might be able to arrange this? Thank you very much for any help.
>
> Sincerely,
> Heidi Johnson
> Assistant Professor
> Librarian
> The College of St. Scholastica
> hjohnso2 at css.edu 
> (218) 723-6488
>
>