[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Questions

[Brandon W. Uhlman]

Hello, Jacque.

The Sitka initiative in British Columbia has migrated sites from  
Sagebrush Athena to Evergreen, and will be migrating additional sites  
over the next several years, so it can be done. I'd encourage you to  
send what questions you can to the list, so everybody can learn from  
the answers, but if there are questions you feel you need to deal with  
off-list, you can e-mail me and I can try to answer them. :)

The IT time involved will depend on the size of the system and the  
knowledge of your staff. Some Evergreen sites (Georgia PINES, BC  
Sitka, the coming Conifer consortium in Canada, UPEI) host their own  
Evergreen implementations. Equinox, the corporate support effort  
consisting of the original Evergreen developers, also provides  
software-as-a-service hosting for Evergreen. Other companies might as  
well, but that's not my area of expertise.

Of the locally hosting sites, most are large consortia and by  
necessity are hosted 'offsite' from some or all of the using sites.  
Some (Innisfil? UPEI?) host on-site. All access - public and staff -  
is via HTTP[S], so hosting doesn't need to be local.

I can't comment authoritatively on Cyrillic support.

The new major release of Evergreen, 1.4, includes a bulk record  
importer/exporter, called 'Vandelay'. If MARC Magician can export  
files of records in MARC format, Vandelay should be able to import  
them into Evergreen. Currently, a series of server-side scripts  
(marc2vbre.pl, direct_ingest.pl, pg_loader.pl) can import files of  
MARC records.

I hope this information is of some help to you. Please let the list  
know if we can help you more!

~B

Quoting jgage at bartoncountylibrary.com:

> I don’t even know if this is the right place to ask questions about
> Evergreen.  I’m doing some legwork about looking into options for an ILS for
> a small theological seminary in Austria.  Open source looks like it might be
> an option for us to seriously consider, but those of us working on the
> project have some questions about Evergreen.
>
> *	We nee to be able access bib records in both the English and
> Cyrillic alphabets.  Reading that it appears work is being done to have the
> whole system in other languages, does anyone know if  it will include all of
> the languages that our students use (Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian,
> Polish, Romanian, Russian)
> *	Will Evergreen import MARC records in batches from MARC Magician?
> *	Has anyone migrated from Athena to Evergreen, and would they be
> willing to talk to us?
> *	I was surprised that I did not see a Sort by Call # option in the
> search results list (not a deal breaker, but nice to have).  Is this being
> addressed?
> *	How much IT time will a system like this involve?  Where is it
> hosted?  How much server space?  On or off-site hosting?
>
> Anyone who can direct me in the right direction to find answers to these
> (and probably a thousand more)??  Thanks in advance!
>
> .Jacque Gage
> Barton County Library
> 300 W. 10th
> Lamar, MO 64759
>
> 417-682-5355 - voice
> 417-682-3206 - fax
> jgage at bartoncountylibrary.com

======================================
Brandon W. Uhlman, Systems Consultant
Public Library Services Branch
British Columbia Ministry of Education
Vancouver, BC (and Lillooet, BC)

Phone: (604) 660-2972 or (250) 256-0344
E-mail: brandon.uhlman at gov.bc.ca
         brandon.uhlman at bclibrary.ca