[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Enter the Spork

[Lori Bowen Ayre]

Very exciting news!

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:

> [Pardon the cross-posting]
>
> Over the last eight months I have been actively working on a new
> project for Equinox and under contract from OHIONET[1] called
> FulfILLment[2], the goal of which is to create a hybrid
> physical/virtual union catalog and ILL system for seamlessly sharing
> resources between libraries, regardless of the ILS each library
> happens to use.
>
> The thinking behind FulfILLment is simple -- take the power and
> scalability of the Evergreen circulation environment, where we have
> nearly full a priori knowledge of global system state and strong
> algorithms to help get items to patrons, and project that “up” to an
> ILL environment which, heretofore, has typically had little global
> state information.
>
> Evergreen and FulfILLment have been, at the code level, the same
> project thus far.  Many of the recent improvements to Evergreen that
> I’ve been involved with can be credited, partially if not completely,
> to work on FulfILLment, including in-db ingest and import rulesets,
> search speed enhancement, true facets and new features in BibTemplate.
>  This symbiotic relationship will, of course, continue because much of
> what both systems do is very similar on a high level.
>
> Even accepting that Evergreen and FulfILLment will facilitate similar
> ends at the institutions that use them -- specifically, getting items
> into the hands of users -- and will share a great deal of internal
> code and structure, we’ve now reached a point where the details of
> many of the common goals of the two have been tackled.  And so, on
> August 2, 2010, Evergreen grew a spork[3].
>
> FulfILLment now has its own identity and will now rise or fall in its
> own Subversion repository, on its own server, with its own mailing
> lists and (though I hope there will be a lot of crossover) its own
> community.
>
> It’s not a f-f-f ... f-f-f ... you know, that f-word, because
> FulfILLment will not compete with Evergreen.  They will serve
> different purposes and constituencies, and there will always be things
> one can do that the other cannot.  And, they will feed (on) each
> other, both in terms of specific code and conceptual design, moving
> forward.  FulfILLment is, in the best possible sense of the term, a
> derivative project based on Evergreen.
>
> So that’s the code part, but Open Source is about the community,
> right?  This is an open call to all:  jump right in!  Grab the code
> (not much different than trunk Evergreen today, but that will be
> changing fast), join the mailing lists (not much traffic, but if you
> join then that can change!), hop in the IRC channel (#fulfillment on
> FreeNode).  Dip your toe in, ask questions.  This should be a fun ride
> -- it was the first time around with Evergreen -- and the more the
> merrier.
>
> [1] http://www.ohionet.org
> [2] http://blog.esilibrary.com/2008/03/13/the-path-to-fulfillment/
> [3] http://fulfillment-ill.org/websvn/listing.php?repname=FulfILLment
>
> --
> Mike Rylander
>  | VP, Research and Design
>  | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
>  | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
>  | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
>  | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
>
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