academic libraries Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 226 subscribers

[Jason Etheridge]

On 3/29/07, Peter Newman <Peter.Newman at cdu.edu.au> wrote:
> All our servers here run on VMWare ESX infrastructure

Very cool.  I'm a big vmware fan, though I've never used it for servers.

> Are there many academic institutions running Evergreen?

There isn't.  The only live in-production instance of Evergreen
currently is with the PINES consortium and its 265 public libraries,
though I don't expect that to remain true for very long. :)  There's
certainly academic interest and some volunteer contributors from
academic institutions, and recently the Georgia Public Library Service
has partnered with the University of Windsor to develop an
acquisitions/serials module.

I'd like to see Evergreen support not only academic libraries, but
mixed consortia where you have academic, public, and special
libraries.  With that thought, I'd like to pick some brains and see
how some academic needs and concepts might map to public libraries
and/or Evergreen.  I'll throw out a few that come to my mind, and you
guys can correct me if I misinterpret any of them, and add any others
you can think of.

1) Recalls.  Basically, you can have someone like a Professor borrow
an item indefinitely, until someone else wants the item, at which
point the Professor gets notified and is supposed to return the item.
This is probably do-able under the hood now, though there isn't
interface support for it currently.  We basically create a hold type
of Recall and let it trigger such actions as emailing the current
borrower, and maybe resetting the due date for the existing
circulation.

In fact, I think PINES could use something like this.  PINES policy
says Staff don't accrue late fees for items they have out, though
technically they still have due dates.  A Recall could be an easy way
of getting a specific item back from Staff.

2) Reserves.  Basically, materials are set aside (by say, a Professor)
to be used by a specific group of people (maybe everyone taking a
particular course or class).  One way this could be done today is by
creating a shelving/copy location of Reserves (maybe one for each
course) for a library and giving it default properties of Non
Circulating and Non Holdable for items in that location.  Then it
would be a matter of putting patrons/students into certain permission
or profile groups for those courses making use of reserves, and having
the circ rules make exceptions when it encounters those.  For example,
a shelving location of Reserves - Math 101 is non circulating to
students by default, but if a student is a member of the Math 101
Reserve group, then the circ rules will allow them to circulate an
item from that location.  What we're missing today is an easy GUI for
such group and circ rule manipulation.

3) External patron file/data.  This came up in a talk recently;
basically some libraries would like to
feed/create/update/synchronize/etc. the ILS patron records with
information from a central/external patron database (from say, the
Registrar's office), and maybe go in the other direction as well (the
school's account for a student could get flagged if the student has
unresolved issues at a library).  This is doable, and was basically
done in PINES with the migration of Patron data from the old system to
Evergreen.  In general, given any consistently formatted (and keyed or
indexed) data, we can map that data into Evergreen.

Does anything else come to mind?

Thanks!

-- 
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/