[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen Newsletter, November-December issue

Mon Dec 3 15:49:27 EST 2012

Evergreen Newsletter / November-December 2012

Happy Holidays!  It’s the last issue of 2012 and the fifth installment
overall.  Thanks to all those contributors who continue to make this happen.

The Evergreen Hack-A-Way
By Rogan Hamby

In October we had our first ever Evergreen Hack-A-Way in Atlanta, GA hosted
by Equinox Software who gave up their conference room to developers near and
far from the 10th to the 13th.  The goal was to give the developers a chance
to meet mid-year outside of the annual conference and keep up a momentum of
collaborative development.  After a review of how the 2.3 release went, Mike
Rylander was named release manager for 2.4.  Three new core committers were
named: Ben Shum of Bibliomation, Jason Stephenson of MVLC, and Jeff Godin of
Traverse Area District Library, representing both the commitment they have
shown to the community and quality of their contributions.  A lot of
discussion centered around the need for new testing frameworks (both
automated and human) and the need for involvement from all corners of the
community in that effort.  Progress was also made in discussing new possible
client server communication models, handling current security issues,
expanded added content module support and much more.

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International Evergreen Conference 2013 in Vancouver, BC
By Tara Robertson

Program - everyone who submitted a proposal has been contacted (if you
haven't heard anything let me know – information.detective at gmail.com) and
the draft program will be up on the website this week. It looks like a
really strong program--thank you to everyone who submitted a session. Clever
titles include: Ol' Time Acquisitions Rodeo and Variety Show, The Accidental
DBA, and Contributing Code to Evergreen is Easier Than You Think. Thank you
to the program advisory committee for helping Shirley Lew and myself out: 
• Anoop Atre, Equinox Software
• Shauna Borger, Indiana State Library
• Matt Carlson, King County Library Systems
• Dan Scott, Laurentian University
• Chris Sharp, Georgia Library PINES

Register for the conference: http://eg2013.eventbrite.com 
Book your hotel: http://www.deltavancouversuites.ca/1304evereh 

And, if you're not Canadian, get a passport. Here's a one minute primer on
the important bits of Canadian culture: http://youtu.be/BRI-A3vakVg, though
Molson Canadian isn't very good beer. 

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Google Summer of Code 2012 wrap-up: thank you!
By Dan Scott

Tis the season to give thanks for all that we have been fortunate to receive
over the past year! Well, actually, as a Canadian that time was well over a
month ago, and even the Americans in the crowd celebrated Thanksgiving last
week. Given my tardiness, I hope it’s not too late to celebrate the
accomplishments of four students over the summer. Back in March, we were all
excited to hear that Evergreen had been accepted into the Google Summer of
Code (GSoC) program for the second year in a row. This year, we were offered
four student internships, up from two slots in 2011–an encouraging sign
about the maturity of our project. 

• Joseph Lewis returned for his second year in the program. In 2011, he
built a greatly enhanced Library Settings user interface that included
search filters and setting histories. This year, he worked on one of the
crucial tasks of upgrading our core infrastructure from the aging Dojo 1.3
to a more modern version of Dojo, and along with his code contributions he
left us with valuable advice on how to proceed with finalizing the work.
Joseph’s mentor was Thomas Berezansky from the Merrimack Valley Library
Consortium. 
• Swenyu Duan tackled the challenge of optimizing Evergreen’s search
performance by porting some of Evergreen’s core database routines from
PL/Perl to C. Swenyu’s work leveraged the ICU Unicode library for
normalization and built on libxml and libxslt2 to provide C-language
versions of some routines used in merging and overlaying bibliographic
records. Ultimately, he found that the gains to be had from porting to C
were minimal–one of the hard lessons that we often run into as developers is
that theory does not work out in practice–but learned a lot about measuring
performance and creating extensions for PostgreSQL and shared his lessons on
his blog. Swenyu’s mentor was Mike Rylander from Equinox Software. 
• Pranjal Prabhash joined us for the summer to work on building a standard
OpenSRF library for PHP, so that developers will have the ability to easily
integrate Evergreen with common Web frameworks like Drupal and discovery
layers like VuFind. Building on some of previous efforts in this area,
Pranjal was able to build a functioning OpenSRF PHP library and turned his
efforts towards the end of his time towards preparing the code to be
accepted by the PEAR project. Pranjal blogged about his progress and was
mentored by Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley from Equinox Software. 
• Daniel Rizea stepped up to work on another common wishlist item, an
Android client for Evergreen. His efforts included both a patron-oriented
application and an application containing a subset of the staff client.
Daniel’s work exercised and refined Evergreen’s support for Java and
resulted in functional code (ed. I know of at least one university that has
built an experimental app based on Daniel’s code). Daniel wrote about his
efforts on his blog and was mentored by Dan Wells from the Hekman Library,
Calvin College. 

In summary, we were fortunate to have been able to work with four students
over the course of the summer. I like to think that we helped them gain
important experience in working in a large distributed software project, and
hope that (when exams are over and course projects are out of the way!) that
we’ll continue to see them in the IRC channel and on the mailing lists. 
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Google Open Source
Programs Office for supporting the Evergreen project by accepting our
application to GSoC this year and so generously providing stipends for four
students. Google also covered the costs for both Thomas Berezansky and I to
attend the GSoC Mentors’ Summit in October, where we met up with hundreds of
other developers from open source projects to make connections and exchange
experiences and insights during a two-day unconference at the Mountain View
Google campus. 

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November Developers Meeting
By Kathy Lussier

Last month’s Evergreen Developers meeting had a packed agenda. The following
topics were covered during the meeting:

• Developers discussed ways to improve testing for fixes to security-related
bugs. This testing poses difficulties since there is only a small pool of
developers who can test the branch before it is released. 
• David Busby volunteered to set up a server that can be used to test the
code from Google Summer of Code Intern Joseph Lewis to upgrade Evergreen’s
version of Dojo. Once the server is set up, Kathy Lussier will coordinate
testing of the various dojo interfaces.
• The developers agreed that the older javascript catalog (jspac) should
disappear in Evergreen 2.4. However, the new Template Toolkit catalog (tpac)
is still missing several features that were available in jspac. Several
community members volunteered to update
http://www.evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:opac:template-toolkit:
plan to more clearly identify the missing jspac features and to create
related bug reports in Launchpad. Features that should be reinstated in tpac
before jspac is removed will be identified with a jspacremovalblocker tag in
Launchpad. People with concerns about specific features missing from tpac
should contribute and note specific blockers to ripping out jspac.
• There is a large backlog of bugs in Launchpad. Those who can test
submitted code should do so.

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Evergreen Development – News

Seeking Development Partners: Alphabetical Browse in TPAC

The Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative (MassLNC) is planning to work
with Equinox to implement an alphabetical browse in the Template Toolkit
catalog.

A true A-to-Z browse is something we believe will be of value to many
Evergreen libraries.  However, MassLNC needs help funding this project. If
your library is interested in seeing this project implemented in Evergreen
and in becoming a financial partner, please send an e-mail to Kathy Lussier
at klussier at masslnc.org for more information.

MassLNC’s original project requirements can be found at
http://masslnc.cwmars.org/node/2589.

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Evergreen Libraries Update

In the Spotlight:  The COOL Consortium (OHIO)
By Tony Bandy

Since moving to the new TPAC and Evergreen 2.3.1 in November, the Consortium
of Ohio Libraries (COOL) has been enjoying the speed of the catalog as well
as the several new enhancements to the staff client.

Online at http://cool-cat.org, one of the biggest hits we've found so far is
the TPAC, with the extensibility and flexibility of being able to quickly
apply both system updates and opac templates to the individual member
libraries.  From custom images and colors to individualized CSS, the TPAC
has really helped our member libraries to directly address their own unique
library and community needs. 

We've also found that system administration of 2.3 and the TPAC is much
easier as well.  As we are getting ready to add several libraries in the
Spring of 2013, this will help us get them migrated over to the system
quickly, reducing downtime for their patrons.
For the future, we're hoping to go ahead with further customization of the
TPAC as well as the self-checkout and kids KPAC options. While we've still
got a long way to go, the future looks promising.  Check us out online at
http://www.cool-cat.org!
=======
The Howe/Evergreen Project

Meriden Library in Meriden, New Hampshire will be going live with Evergreen
in early
December.  Meriden is one of four libraries that have joined the
Howe/Evergreen Project.

After migrating to Evergreen in 2010, the Howe Library in Hanover, NH formed
the Howe/Evergreen Project to share their Evergreen system with other
libraries in New Hampshire.  The four libraries who have joined the
Howe/Evergreen project have never been automated.  By sharing a system and
receiving support and training from the Howe Library staff, these small
libraries are able to have access to a first-rate system at a reasonable
cost.   
=======
Missouri Evergreen added 3 more libraries in November.  They added
Lebanon-Laclede County Library, Stone County Library, and Webster County
Library.
=======	
Evergreen Indiana recently welcomed its 100th member.  With the recent
addition of the Peabody Public Library (Columbia City) as the 100th member
library, the Evergreen Indiana catalog now provides access to over 6.7
million items and serves 962,252 Indiana residents.  This milestone has been
four-years coming as Evergreen Indiana has grown into one of the largest
shared-catalogue consortiums in the world.
=======
The Berklee College of Music Stan Getz Library, which went live on Evergreen
in August, has a small campus with a library in Spain also running
Evergreen.  The library is called the Berklee Valencia Library.
=======
The COOL consortium in Ohio just upgraded to 2.3 and will be adding three
more libraries in the next 6 months.  The three libraries are Worch Memorial
Public Library, Blanchester Public Library, and Wornstaff Memorial Public
Library.  Their group link is here:  http://info.cool-cat.org/.
=======
The Balsam Consortium in Maine has been awarded a MFC Grant to create
de-duplication tools.   The Consortium has now grown to 17 library systems
encompassing 27 branches.  It is mostly rural, single branch libraries and
public school systems. 

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If you have any news for the next issue of the Evergreen newsletter, the
January-February issue, please email this news to Amy Terlaga at
terlaga at biblio.org. 

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Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation, Inc.
32 Crest Road
Middlebury, CT  06762
203-577-4070 x101
www.biblio.org