[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Advocacy: script for demo'ing Evergreen

[Dan Scott]

Hey all:

I just ran through a demo of Evergreen to the staff and librarians here;
apart from some of the gremlins that accompany live demos (such as when the
whole system is running on your laptop, and you've forgotten to check how
the video-out from your laptop is working for a while, and of course it
isn't working at all), things went quite well. Preparing the demo made me
remember just how advanced many of the features of Evergreen are; sometimes
you can forget that when your head is buried in a mountain of code. Kudos,
again, to the original developers for building such a nice, flexible system.

In case other people are interested in giving a demo of Evergreen to their
local library / Linux Users Groups / library school / whereever, I thought
that my script outline might be useful for reuse. Right now it's just a set
of bullet points, but I think it could be relatively easily adapted into a
full script for a demo -- even turned into a screencast, if someone has the
time / inclination.

If there's interest, I could add this into the wiki so that others can
annotate / add to it.

1. Intro: what's going on!
  * Georgia PINES background
  * Evergreen is born
  * Community is growing

2. Catalogue
  * Basic search:
    *  Relevance-ranked results
    *  ANDed by default
    *  Search syntax like Google [cats dogs] vs. [cats -dogs] vs. ["cats and
dogs"]
    * No stopwords: "To be or not to be", "it" on title
  * Results:
    * Facets (subjects, authors, series)
    * Spell check (search for "zoup")
    * Shelf browse
    * Place hold (volume-level hold in catalogue, item holds currently only
through staff client)
    * Added content is supported
  * Advanced search:
    * Reorder search results
    * Limit by form, type, language, audience
  * Bookbags
    * Shared (in catalogue or via RSS) or private use only
    * No practical limit on number of bookbags or items in bookbaks

3. Administration interfaces
  * Basic configuration interfaces
  * Pretty Django interface

4. Staff client
  * Log in / registration
  * Offline mode
  * Circulation
    * Checkout / Discharge
    * Patron registration
    * Receipt printing
  * Cataloging
    * Z39.50 copy cataloging
    * Manual adjustments to record
    * New records from templates
    * Basic authority support
  * Reporting
    * Walk through data relationships, transforms
    * Basic graphing capabilities
    * CSV / Excel output (no stupid field truncation / forced page headers!)
    * Scheduler, email delivery

5. What's missing (from an academic library perspective)?
  * Acquisitions
  * Serials
  * ERM
  * Academic reserves
  * A good bulk record import interface
  * Authority maintenance interface
  * Bilingual staff client

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University
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