[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Using Evergreen in a Small Specialist Library

[Jason Etheridge]

> This is my first post to the list, and I wonder if someone would be able to
> answer some of the (more basic) questions which I have about the system.

Hey James, I don't know if anyone answered you off-list, but I'll give
it a shot. :-)

> I would be interested in hearing about the experience of others in small
> institutions who use the system for OPAC, circulation and acquisition, any
> benefits or issues which might be relevant in smaller libraries.

Hrmm, one potential (and cosmetic) issue is that the default OPAC skin
is geared toward presenting multiple libraries.  If you're just a
single library and you setup your org hierarchy in Evergreen as a
single org unit, then some of the menus where you can pick a library
or range of libraries become superfluous.

> One of the issues that we would have is about putting the individual titles
> of pieces of music within a collection of tunes into a searchable field in
> the system, to create an index of tunes – the same would also be required in
> terms of our audio collection, as one of our key requirements is that users
> would want to listen to different performances of the same piece, and as we
> are starting from scratch it would be very useful to have that capacity.

If the cataloging culture revolving around the MARC format has a way
of representing this, then it should pose no problem for Evergreen.
We can index anything in the MARC, and to a certain extent do already.
 However, there are other features being considered by the Evergreen
community that don't exist currently that may also impact this, such
as ways to express "bound with" and "parent-child" relationships
between items and bib records.

> I think that’s about it at the moment, and I will very grateful for any
> input that list members can provide.

I hope this helps!

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Tactical Development
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com