[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Presenting at LinuxFest Northwest

[Dan Scott]

On 28/03/2008, Paul Bartell <paul.bartell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey. Im going to be presenting a talk about FOSS in libraries, and am
>  probably going to focus a lot on evergreen. This brings up the
>  question of what exactly do you think people would be interested in
>  seeing at such a conference.
>
>  I was thinking of giving an overview of what Evergreen/open-ils is,
>  and overview the costs of tradidtional ils' and compare those prices
>  to prices of evergreen support companies.
>
>  The ill go over installation and demo usage of evergreen.
>
>  does anyone have any more ideas of what i should talk about? possibly
>  how GPLS sort of instigated its creation?


Hey Paul:

I wouldn't focus too much on installation - for most people in your
audience, it will probably be too technical. Just saying something
like "installing Evergreen is more complex than installing Office
2007, but once you've figured it out you can install it in about half
an hour - and how often do you install an ILS, anyways?" is probably
enough.

Talking about the business case for choosing an open source ILS (it's
not about the amount of money - that's a red herring, as support costs
are often similar to that for a proprietary ILS - it's about the
return on that investment), showing off some of the cool things
Evergreen can do, and some discussion about who's using or adopting
Evergreen will probably be more interesting to the audience.

Any of the content from my presentations is available under a Creative
Commons license (by attribution, non-commercial, share alike) and
might offer good fodder for your presentation. In order of
presentation date (newest first):

* State of Evergreen acquisitions (and Evergreen for academic
institutions) (2008-03-12):
http://coffeecode.net/archives/152-Evergreen-Acquisitions-at-VALEs-Next-Generation-Academic-Library-System-Symposium.html

* The State of Evergreen (2008-01-28):
http://coffeecode.net/archives/149-The-State-of-Evergreen-OLA-Presentation.html

* Evergreen business readiness rating (2007-10-12):
http://coffeecode.net/archives/142-Laurentian-goes-ever-greener.html

* Business case for an open source ILS (2007-04-22):
http://coffeecode.net/archives/123-Evergreen-and-the-business-case-for-choosing-an-open-source-ILS.html

See also the OPAC walk-through for ideas of cool catalog features to
show off: http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=advocacy:evergreen_walk-through_script

And if you haven't already, you might want to browse through the blogs
at http://open-ils.org/blog , http://coffeecode.net ,
http://esilibrary.com/blog to pick out some other gems - hmm, am I
missing any here?

And good luck - if you want to share your slides with us for a review
before the presentation for feedback, feel free!

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University