[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Why Evergreen?

[Duimovich, George]

There are a number of technical / architectural differences that could be highlighted but the relevance of these differences will of course depend upon your requirements. For one example, Evergreen's PostgreSQL's capapilities were of keen interest to us to better support GIS / geospatial type search requirements we have.  So of course you'll want to "tease out" any technical requirements that are better served by one system over the other.
 
Both since Koha & Evergreen have so much to offer, I'd be reluctant to to generalize on some of these factors as one library's "must have" requirement is another's "not applicable"  etc. 
 
But just as important for us was the "community factor." At the time we jumped on board with an open source ILS, we had pre-existing relationships with virtually all existing early adoptors of Evergreen in Canada, but no relationships with any Koha libraries. So that helped us significantly, as these were folks we had engaged with on a variety of levels, but especially on Evergreen.  So in a sense, we had a community already in place and had the confidence it would work for us when we finally decided to move to Evergreen.
 
This is absolutely not to suggest that one community is better than the other, only that you may already have pre-existing networks that could help you succeed in moving in one direction over the other (as it did for us thanks to colleagues at Conifer, UPEI, & BC Sitka).  Evaluate, use and explore these synergies early on and your choice of Koha or Evergreen will pay off sooner. 
 
George Duimovich
NRCan Library / Bibliothèque de RNCan 
Ottawa, Canada
________________________________

From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Buster
Sent: March 1, 2011 09:22
To: open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Why Evergreen?


Hello, group. My system is currently evaluating both Koha and Evergreen as our open source alternatives. We are installing both on computers here in our library in order to test them out, visiting other libraries, reading this list as well as the one for Koha, and speaking to other librarians using one of these systems.

It occurred to me that it might useful to know why other library system chose one system over the other.

So, why did you choose Evergreen, and are you happy with your choice? Was it a difficult decision?

You may write to me off-list if you are more comfortable with that. 

Thanks in advance,
--Jim Maroon

storypage at gmail.com <http://gmail.com/> 

-- 


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"The man, who, by his own and his family's labour, can provide a sufficiency of food and raiment and a comfortable dwelling place, is not a poor man." --William Cobbett, Cottage Economy, 1826.

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