[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] general questions - small implementation

Thu Oct 4 11:16:29 EDT 2007

Hello Graham:

Graham Saathoff wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Evergreen seems like a great solution for what I'm trying to do, but I 
> have a few questions -- hopefully I can get an answer from someone who 
> understands it better than I do.
We will do our best to answer them ;).
>
> I'm the technical contact/sysadmin for a small housing cooperative 
> (about 40 members in 4 houses).  We're looking to move to a more 
> robust library management system for our library, which has about 
> 4,000 volumes.  Our network and most of our workstations run Linux, 
> and most users are comfortable with open source software.
>
> I want to create a system that will allow members to check books out 
> of our central library with a barcode scanner.  Since all of our 
> holdings are owned by individual members, I want a system that can 
> send an automated email message to the owner of a book when it is 
> checked out (with information about the patron who has taken the book) 
> so that it can be retrieved if necessary.
Evergreen does not have built-in capability to automatically e-mail the 
owning library upon circulation of their items.  The original target 
audience of Evergreen was a library consortium circulating tens of 
thousands of items a day throughout dozens (or even hundreds) of branch 
libraries.  The numerous e-mails that would be generated for all these 
circulations would be very difficult to deal with.  Typically, if a 
library wanted to know whom had a particular item, they would simply 
check in the staff client.

However, that being said, a solution could easily be made to adapt 
Evergreen to do this.  Probably the easiest thing is to create a report 
that runs nightly and automatically e-mails the result to the library.  
Of course, Evergreen is Open-Source under the GPL, which means you can 
also add the functionality natively if you so desire.
>
> Search by author/title is also important, but not as critical as the 
> above requirement.  Most members of the coop take a book out of the 
> library because it interests them, not because they searched for it 
> (as I said above, we don't have many books availalble)
Searching for items is considered a critical function in Evergreen, and 
thus a great deal of time has been put in to it.  As an end user, these 
searches would usually take place in the Online Public Access Catalog 
(or OPAC).  I would encourage you to try out the demo OPAC at 
http://demo.gapines.org. 
>
> Can Evergreen handle this?  Any ideas about equipment needed or 
> estimates of roll-out time would be helpful.  I'm very comfortable 
> with linux and have managed several other networks in the past.  Is 
> there a specific skillset that I need beyond basic networking / 
> scripting experience that I might need?
With the exception of automatic e-mails upon circulating items, 
Evergreen can easily do what you seem to want.  To get an idea of the 
installation, I would encourage you to check out the community 
documentation wiki at http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php. 
>
> Thanks,
> Graham

Hope this answers most of your questions.  If you have any further, 
please feel free to e-mail the list again and we will try to help you out!

--Don