[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] routing books

[Don McMorris]

Hi John:

Thanks for the interest in Evergreen!  I'm sure you will find it quite
useful.  If and when you start to work with it, please do not hesitate
to utilize the open-ils-dev and open-ils-general lists for assistance.

Evergreen is extremely scalable.  Being built upon OpenSRF (which was
also developed by the PINES staff), servers can be added and dropped
extremely easily.  There's no problem running it on a single server,
nor is there problems running it on many.  In the blog archives,
there's a small virtual tour of the PINES datacenter outlining their
particular setup.

Provided a well-planned server environment, Evergreen should scale
very well to a nationwide area..  Of course, there's politics involved
where a lot of libraries wouldn't likely use an ILS shared on a
national scale (at least in the US at this current time).

Protocols such as NCIP and Z39.50 are intended to aide in ILL,
although there are reasons why they aren't implemented to their full
extent (usually comes back to politics).  Of course, Evergreen
implements both of these protocols.  And, being Open Source, it is
possible to add other methods/protocols (widely-used open standards
will likely be included eventually from stock if not already, but if
you use a proprietary protocol you can implement it).

Thank you for your interest in Evergreen.  Please continue to utilize
the resources of this list.  Feedback is appreciated if you have any
comments or concerns.

Sincerely Yours,

Don McMorris
Salem NY

On 1/29/07, John Kintree <jkintree at swbell.net> wrote:
> Thanks, Mike.  Your answer, below, sounds like an elegant solution.  Since
> Evergreen is designed for scalability, maybe it could support a national or
> global consortium, which would be more user-friendly than current
> Inter-Library Loan (ILL) procedures.
> John Kintree
> http://home.swbell.net/jkintree/islt/
>
> Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:
>  On 1/28/07, John Kintree wrote:
> > When a patron requests a book that is not in the collection of the local
> > library, and several libraries in the system have that item, is there a
> > feature within Evergreen that automatically determines which library that
> > has the requested book is the library from which the book will be
> borrowed?
>
> Yes ...
>
> > What are the rules by which the lending and routing of books within a
> > statewide consortium operate, and how are those rules integrated into
> > Evergreen?
>
> The rules are based on organizational proximity, item age, item type
> and locally defined rules that can look at many attributes of the
> items, requesting patrons and even staff, if a staff member is placing
> a hold for a patron.
>
> In PINES, there are three levels to the hierarchy: Consortium, System
> and Branch. And, of course, this hierarchy is installation specific,
> so it can be as deep or broad as is needed.
>
> The short version: the system first looks at other organizational
> units within the pickup location's parent organization (the System of
> a Branch in PINES) and targets items there. The targeting rotates
> daily, so if the first item targeted is not captured then it rolls to
> another at the same proximity. If there are no available copies in
> the pickup location's parent organization then it looks farther up the
> hierarchy (the entire Consortium in PINES) and the same daily
> targeting rotation occurs on those items. There are also various ways
> to affect which copies can and cannot be transited between different
> levels of the hierarchy, including optional proximity protection for
> newly added items based on their age.
>
> We also plan to add geospacial information and the possibility of
> administrator supplied route weighting to the hold targeting system so
> that Evergreen can better decided which copies will fulfill the
> request fastest.
>
> All of this is integrated directly into the cataloging and circulation
> workflow, so that it's just a matter of setting attributes on copies.
> The one exception is scripted rules which are supplied using simple
> server-side logic written in JavaScript (yes, server-side JavaScript!
> :) ), though this is mainly used for very specific (and rare)
> overrides of the general targeting rule system.
>
> > John Kintree
> > http://home.swbell.net/jkintree/islt/
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Mike Rylander
> mrylander at gmail.com
> GPLS -- PINES Development
> Database Developer
> http://open-ils.org
>
>