[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions and serials

[Mike Rylander]

On 1/2/07, John Kintree <jkintree at swbell.net> wrote:
> Would it be feasible or desirable to incorporate the acquisitions and
> serials modules of Koha into Evergreen?  What are Georgia libraries using

I've casually looked at the Koha code from the 2.x branch and it
doesn't seem like there's much that would fit into the existing EG
infrastructure.  It's dependent on Koha internals, and those internals
are extremely different from the Evergreen internals.  I haven't had a
chance to look at the forthcoming version 3 code yet.

It's too early to say anything specific about implementation at this
point, but our current thinking is to build acquisitions and serials
atop an open source ERP/ERM product, perhaps OFBiz.

In the coming months PINES will be conducting several focus groups to
gather requirements from the active production users of Evergreen, and
the University of Windsor (and, of course, anyone else who would like
to participate) will be helping to drive the overall plan for
acq/serials.  Once we have a better feeling of the functional
requirements and both end-user /and/ administrative concerns, we can
begin looking at implementation strategies.

> for acquisitions and serials while waiting for that functionality in
> Evergreen?

PINES was never able to make use of any vendor supplied acq system.
There was no way to provide enough separation of responsibility
because traditional ILSs represent libraries as one big, flat group --
PINES is 45 separate systems (46 by the end of this month).  So,
unfortunately, each PINES system was forced to manage acq on its own
-- and they'll continue to do this until the EG acq module is
completed.

Now, EG is designed to allow as much (or as little) local
administration as is needed using a very flexible permission system,
and the organizational hierarchy is installation defined such that it
can represent the true funding/political/consortial setup of the
supported libraries.  That will be used heavily in the acq subsystem
whatever it ends up being built from.

As for serials support, that also never worked properly for PINES,
though I know less about that situation.

> John Kintree
> MLS graduate from University of Missouri-Columbia
>


-- 
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org