[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] What are your requirements for Evergreen?

[Deb Bergeron]

Ok Dan--thanks for bringing the conversation over here!

You mentioned several modules.  One important module is the OPAC.   Here 
we need both one for patrons and one for librarians.  I've mentioned 
before that it's always a balancing act that includes the 'necessary' 
information for most librarians with those of the faculty and student 
patrons.  I realize there are several OS OPAC models out there, and 
perhaps one or more of these could be integrated.  Oh, and by the way, 
make sure that all the information can be viewed and downloaded to not 
only a computer, but any hand-held device.

Someone mentioned an ILL module--thank you!  We need a resource sharing 
module that will accomodate not only resource sharing within a 
consortial setting, but within a larger environment as well (i.e. the 
state, country, world--why are we not thinking like Google?!).  This 
module must have the ability to 'talk to' the ILS and update the 
database in real-time without human interaction.  And, could you make 
this module modular so we can use it with any ILS? 

So, based on the previous postings, we'd have:

Cataloging
Acquisitions
Serials
Circulation
OPAC
ILL
Reports/Stats
ERM

After building the base modules, let's think outside the box and include 
all the wizbang stuff students want (most of this is already available 
via ENCORE,  Endeca, and other products.)

Reviews
Tagging
Chat--including voip
IM
Faceting

Functionality not in an ILS (at least not that I've seen):

Add the ability to customize and add functionality similar to Google and 
Firefox.
Throw in some social networking capability or allow it to be added on in 
a modular fashion--again over several devices.

Now I'm going to go think about this some more.


Deb





Dan Scott wrote:
> I would like to start a discussion thread on the following subject, as
> I believe it's incredibly important to the success of the project and
> I don't think we've had much discussion about it yet. Perhaps this
> discussion will also be able to feed into the Duke initiative to write
> a design requirements document for an academic library system.
>
> (Note that "Project Conifer" refers to the project to implement a
> consortial install of Evergreen for Laurentian University, McMaster
> University, and the University of Windsor.)
>
> "What are the base requirements that have to be in place before we, as
> an academic library, or consortium of academic libraries, can migrate
> to Evergreen?"
>
> I'll kick off the discussion by giving an overview of the basic parts
> of the library system (both functionality and "soft requirements" like
> docs and training) and my understanding of where things are. Please
> feel free to broaden beyond what I provide here, as I will undoubtedly
> forget or mangle some of these! I believe that the answers may differ
> for different institutions, of course.
>
> An acquisitions system is a given for everyone, and we're currently
> working on that in the acq-experiment branch, as documented in
> http://open-ils.org/blog/?p=101 http://open-ils.org/blog/?p=108 and
> http://open-ils.org/blog/?p=115, as well as in the wiki at
> http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:acq_serials
>
> A serials module is also a base requirement for everyone. On top of
> the acquisitions portion (subscription support, vs. basic one-time
> purchases), at a basic level we need basic patterns (overlay calendars
> with exceptions), a helpful check-in interface, and claiming.
>
> Academic reserves are another base requirement for each site.
> Essentially, give the system the ability to associate one or more
> items with one or more courses (instructor, course name, course code)
> and, by doing so, temporarily override the physical location of the
> item. Longer term it would be nice to have integration with courseware
> (WebCT / Blackboard / Moodle / Sakai) so that the reserve items would
> automatically be displayed as part of the course list, and it would
> also be nice if Evergreen could integrate with the campus academic
> system to know what courses a student was registered in and display
> those courses & reserve lists from the catalogue.
>
> Internationalization (i18n). One facet of this (internationalization
> of addresses to allow Canadian / American / arbitrary address formats
> from around the world) affects everyone. BC has already been able to
> customize Evergreen to support Canadian addresses, so a basic level of
> support is there. However, Laurentian in particular requires pervasive
> bilingual support - which is one of the development pieces I'm
> actively working towards. We hope to have this completed in the next
> few weeks; after that, we simply need to send off the strings to
> translation and our needs will be met. The new acquisitions system is
> being built to be i18n-ready from the ground up.
>
> Circulation: Are there circulation requirements beyond what Evergreen
> already offers today?
>
> Cataloguing:
>   * We have added infrastructural support for being able to search
> multiple Z39.50 sources at once, which was one of the requirements
> voiced at the Conifer Acquisitions session.
>   * Equinox has stated a number of times that they would like to
> rewrite the existing cataloguing client knowing what they do now. If
> our staff do not like the current cataloguing client, it might be
> possible to use a third-party cataloguing client (OCLC Connexion
> Client, for example) instead.
>   * Authority control: there is some rudimentary authority control
> built into Evergreen today.
>   * Bulk import of MARC records and authority records: the current
> interface for bulk imports of MARC records is the command line, which
> is not particularly friendly when you face the need to import, say,
> 12,000 records for a new set of Springer e-books.
>
> Catalogue: Do we have requirements beyond surfacing new functionality
> like academic reserves, acquisition requests, etc in the catalogue?
>
> Reporting: The current reporting module is extremely powerful, but it
> comes with no standard report templates. With that power comes a
> certain amount of complexity (it is essentially a nice GUI wrapper
> around the relational schema of the database, so understanding
> relational databases helps a lot) that means that our best approach
> for moving forward will probably be to define what standard report
> templates we want out of the box, then assign someone or some people
> to create those templates.
>
> Documentation and training: There is currently not much in the way of
> official (staff and librarian-oriented) documentation available for
> Evergreen. I started an effort to write "The Book of Evergreen", but
> that faltered when I turned my attention towards more basic
> infrastructure.
>
> Data partitions: in a consortial environment, what is necessary in
> terms of separating one Library's data from another's yet? For
> example: should a Laurentian acquisitions person be able to see
> McMaster's acquisition accounts and individual funds?
>
> Migration of existing data: Apart from bib records / holdings / patron
> records / authority records and open transactions (for example, books
> that are currently checked out), what other data do we want to migrate
> - complete transaction records dating back as far as our existing
> systems allow? Or would we be satisfied just exporting a static set of
> statistics so that we can combine data from the live system with the
> statistics from the old system (for example: circ counts by barcode by
> year)? Either way, we will have to define what data we want to
> migrate, then figure out how to migrate that into the new system.
>
>   

-- 

Deb Bergeron <mailto:bergeron at macalester.edu> System Admin: User Support
CLIC Consortium <http://clic.edu>
1619 Dayton Avenue, Suite 204A
Saint Paul, MN 55104
O:*651.644.3878* C:*651.487.7609* F:651.644.6258

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