[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Are there any K-12 Schools Using the Evergreen system?

Tue Oct 30 20:48:52 EDT 2007

James,

I'll go ahead and reply on the list for now... in case anyone else is interested. This is probably a bad decision, as I will doubtless insult vendors and incite flame wars...

I am not aware of any other K-12s using Evergreen, but I've never "asked around," so it is very possible that there are some. I do meet with other Technology Directors from the area on a monthly basis, and I plan on bringing up Evergreen at the next meeting. I expect that it will receive a warm response. My gut feeling (for my area at least) is that most of the districts in my area aren't aware of Evergreen's existence, as it is a relatively young project in a niche area.

The installation of Evergreen does take a little more work than most Open Source packages due to the number of supporting elements required. However, it's certainly installable. If you've installed Moodle, I'm certain that you can handle Evergreen. My installation is actually on a Suse 10.2 box... so if you have any questions I might be able to answer them. For the most part, I followed the installation instructions on the wiki for Ubuntu. There were a few steps that were different, and a few quirks, but I didn't have any major problems.

As far as the switch goes, we've had the same ILS vendor for at least a decade. Their products have always provided solid basic functionality. At various points, I've looked at purchasing additional modules to extend that functionality, or jumping ship completely. At one point, several years ago, I was fairly close to going with Innovative Interfaces... but I never got around to making the jump.

This year, my current ILS vendor started to push for migration to their latest flagship product. I've already been forced to migrate with them once... I really wasn't looking forward to purchasing my *third* ILS from a single vendor.

So, I decided to jump ship. For the fun of it, I googled "Open Source Library Software," and found both the Koha and Evergreen projects. I installed both Koha and Evergreen. From my point of view, Evergreen was ahead of both Koha and the commercial systems I had seen in previous years... so I went with it.

The bottom line on the drive to change is that I was unhappy with my existing system, and for my purposes Evergreen either meets or exceeds commercial offerings... in many cases, exceeds.

We haven't out-sourced support or the migration process... which has been smooth so far.

I hope that answers your questions... if you have anymore, please let me know.

Thanks!

Travis Schafer
Technology Director
Carson City - Crystal Area Schools
Carson City, MI 48811
P: (989) 584-6905
F: (989) 584-6915

>>> "James Tasto" <James.Tasto at isd742.org> 10/30/2007 3:12 PM >>>
Travis,

Thank you so much for your reply.

Are you aware of any other K-12 sites using or moving to Evergreen?

I have some Linux backround. Enough to Set up Moddle (blog/forum) on Suse 10. Might the open-ils be over my head?

Do you have out-sourced support for your migration?

What drove you to move to this product?

Please keep in touch with us on this directly, or via the list-serv.

James Tasto
St. Cloud Area District 742 Schools
Information Technologies Dept.
Office : 320-252-8770, x1580
Cell: 320-333-4360
Fax: 320-529-4302
Page: 320-709-1138

>>> "Travis Schafer" <tschafer at carsoncity.k12.mi.us> 10/30/2007 >>>
Carson City - Crystal Area Schools, in Michigan, is in the process of migrating. We are moving our first building into production later this week. Based on my experiences so far, I would highly recommend Evergreen to any K12 looking for an ILS. It is definitely a high quality product, and the documentation (on the dev side), has made it easy to add features that are specific to our situation (IE, we wrote an interface to synchronize student patrons with our Student Information System).

Travis Schafer
Technology Director
Carson City - Crystal Area Schools
Carson City, Michigan

>>> "James Tasto" <James.Tasto at isd742.org> 10/30/2007 10:41 AM >>>
Are there any K-12 schools using the Evergreen system? We are Minnesota ISD742 St. Cloud Area K-12 Schools and are in the middle of product vendor selection.

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