[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Writing an Evergreen manual

[Karen Collier]

Dan,

I love the idea.  I think it'll really help to promote Evergreen within
libraries that might be sitting on the fence to have a carefully organized
and comprehensive document like you're describing, explaining Evergreen's
strengths, why one would want to migrate, as well as overviews of the server
setup and migration process, administration, and day to day usage of the
staff client and OPAC.  I'd also like to help to the extent that I can.

I have a couple of comments on the testbook you set up.  First, it could be
my computer with the issues, but I'm seeing funny characters in the
headings.  For example "Chapter[funny_character] 1.[funny_character] Why
read this book?" where funny_character looks like a capital A with a hat.
Any idea what's causing this?

Secondly, I like the literary reference in "A Tale of Two Evergreen Systems"
but I'm not sure those two examples are fully inclusive.  My library system
is a small rural public library that is not yet a consortium.  We may in the
future want to bring our county's school libraries' collections into the
catalog or merge catalogs with our neighboring systems, and like the idea of
being prepared for that future possibility, which is part of why we like
Evergreen.  There are also a lot of other features of Evergreen that appeal
to a small library such as ourselves, even if we won't necessarily use the
full extent of its features.

Thanks,
Karen

Karen Collier
Public Services Librarian
Kent County Public Library
408 High Street
Chestertown, MD 21620
410-778-3636


Hi Sally et al:

I apologize to everyone for getting people excited about this, and then
about not making much progress beyond checking the skeleton table of
contents into the Subversion repository. I was trying to get a nightly build
of the documentation in PDF and XHTML set up on open-ils.org but it's been
slow going. Since Thursday I've been in transit and on vacation, taking a
needed break from the computer, but plan to get back in the swing of things
this week if the Access conference schedule allows me to.

A few quick responses:

  * I don't expect everyone to contribute in DocBook format. I've mentioned
this in response to a few private inquiries about contributing, but as far
as I'm concerned I'm interested in well-written accurate documentation -
format be damned. If it's a useful addition to the manual, you can hand it
to me on a paper towel and I'll do the work of converting it over to
DocBook. Of course, over time having more DocBook-savvy people will
certainly help the documentation project, but in the short term I'm happy to
do the relatively light lifting of converting to DocBook format. I'm worried
more about maintaining a consistent voice and style than I am about
consistent markup - the reason I wrote up two rough scenarios for libraries
deploying Evergreen was because I would like to have each section touch on
those scenarios and what differs depending on the scenario.

  * DocBook certainly can handle graphics and illustrations to go along with
text.

  * The original template is in the Evergreen Subversion repository at
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/browser/trunk/docs/index.xml - my rough
plan is to break this up into separate files over time and flesh out
chapters so that they can be used as templates.

Sally, please feel free to add some more information to the wiki, as you
suggested! I'm happy to have others carry the ball for this project too.

--
Dan Scott
Laurentian University