[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] May 2012 Evergreen Newsletter: Conference Edition

[Amy Terlaga]

Hello, friends - here is our May Evergreen Newsletter:  Conference Edition

 

Amy

 

May 2012 Evergreen Newsletter:
Conference Edition

 

Two-hundred-and-seventy-one members of the Evergreen community convened in
Indianapolis during the last week of April for our fourth annual Evergreen
International Conference.  This was a sizable increase from last year's
number of 180 attendees.  Our community continues to grow up and out, with
representatives from Mexico, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, Wales, and
the U.S. in attendance.

 

Jim Corridan, Shauna Borger and their crew from the Indiana State Library
kept us all busy, informed, and entertained during the four days of the
conference.  Here are some of the highlights:

 

Hackfest / Interest Group Day (Wednesday)

 

The Wednesday Developer Hackfest proved to be very fruitful.  A number of
projects were tackled including making Syndetics content appear in TPAC and
a Mexican-Spanish translation of the catalog.  Dan Scott showed the others
how to sign off on patch contributions, too.

 

The Documentation Interest Group (DIG) meeting was led by Yamil Suarez of
Berkeley College of Music in Boston.  DIG is looking for proof-readers to
review the documentation that has been approved for the website.   If
interested, you can email documentation at evergreen-ils.org.

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT:  Reports Interest Group, by Jenny Turner, PALS
Over 30 individuals interested in reports in Evergreen met ; attendees were
from a variety of libraries with various experience using Evergreen's
reports interface. 

Meeting attendees broke into groups according to interest.  Jenny Turner
(PALS) convened a Q&A session for Evergreen Reports newbies and
investigators.  Jessica Venturo (Bibliomation) lead a group that discussed
staff client report ideas, new features in 2.2, and brainstormed items to
add to the Taskforce's wish lists
<http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-reports:taskforce_wish_l
ists> .  Amy Terlaga (Bibliomation) met with current and interested SQL
reporters to share ideas on how this form of reporting may be used.

Following the small group meetings, Darrell Rodgers of Emerald Data Systems
shared wireframes of development his company intends to do for GPLS to
create a user-friendly interface for management-level reporting.  These
wireframes are now available on the Evergreen website:
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-reports:reports_wire
frames. 

Notes from the Reports Interest Group's meeting will be made available on
the Reports Taskforce's website in the near future.  Watch the Evergreen
General
<http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-general>  and
Reports
<http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-reports>
mailing lists for news about our upcoming meeting - all are welcome!
Interested in learning more about our work?  Contact Jenny Turner at
reports at evergreen-ils.org. 

 

Conference Opening Remarks:  The State of Evergreen (Thursday)

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT:  The State of Evergreen, by Tara Robertson, Systems and
Technical Services Librarian, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
I was asked to participate in The State of Evergreen because of the unsung
heroes project. I loved the series of blog posts that Chris Cormack has been
doing to highlight Koha community members and adapted his idea for the
Evergreen community. I learned two things. First, people were reluctant to
promote themselves and write bios listing all their accomplishments. I
shouldn't have been surprised by this. It was more effective to ask
someone's coworker, colleague or boss to highlight their contributions. I
like that our community values humility, but know that most people enjoy
being recognized for work that they are proud of. Second, some people felt
that the work that they did was insignificant and not worthy of being
recognized. Almost all of these people were women who had been nominated by
other people in the community. After an email or two all of these people
agreed to be profiled. I want to help foster a culture where we recognize
and value all sorts of contributions that are key to making the community
strong, sustainable and an enjoyable place to be. What do you want this
community to look like? Why do you put your time and energy into making
Evergreen better? 

 

User Programs (Thursday and Friday)


The user programs were varied, covering a wide range of topics - everything
from "Evergreen Basics" for newbies to the nitty gritty of circulation rules
settings with "Down the Rabbit Hole: In-Database Approach For
Circulation/Hold Policy Configuration."

Tony Bandy of OHIONET had this to say about the Template Toolkit OPAC
Customizations: Nuts and Bolts program on Friday:  "Learning about the
Template Toolkit OPAC and all of the coming options for our consortium,
(COOL, http://www.cool-cat.org), I'm excited about the many changes on the
way."

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT:  PROGRAM - Resource Sharing in Evergreen
Grace Dunbar, Tara Robertson, and Mike Rylander teamed up to discuss the
many different Evergreen objects that could be shared, both within your own
library system and beyond, with the whole Evergreen community.  Especially
exciting was the announcement that Equinox will be establishing a central
object sharing service that they will host for the community.  Objects such
as report templates and serial prediction patterns could be uploaded and
downloaded whenever libraries wanted to share the fruits of their labors.
Pending some development in the related Evergreen modules, the link to this
shared server would be seamless; if a library searched for a report on their
own server and did not find it, they could automatically be directed to the
shared server.  There will also be a built-in description and rating system
to ensure that well designed templates and reports are more discoverable.

 

Team Indiana is in the process of collecting all PowerPoints from the user
programs.  You will be able to eventually find them by starting here:
http://evergreen2012.org/conference-programs-posted-on-blog/

 

Fun in Indy


There was no end to the good time fun during the evening hours; when the sun
went down, the dine arounds, receptions, good drinks and good conversation
could be had by all.  One of the big hits was the Friday Night Pub Crawl
which began at The Ram Brewery, with a surprise private brewery tour.
Participants learned about specialty brewmaking with exotic ingredients like
bacon.  No bacon beer was left to partake, as unfortunately it had a very
limited run due to its overly aggressive bacon mouth feel.  The night ended
at The Slippery Noodle where a blues band played into the wee hours, leaving
Matt Carlson of KCLS to tweet, "Band at the Slipperynoodle tearing the Blues
up right now, amazing. Think i've found the best place in Indiana"

 

Board Update / Developer Update / Community Meeting (Saturday)


Elizabeth McKinney led the Evergreen Oversight Board update which included
the introductions of the new Board members Rogan Hamby, Kathy Lussier, and
Ben Hyman.

 

Galen Charlton, assisted by most of the Evergreen developers, did a bang up
job with the Developer Update.  He explained that Evergreen releases will
all now have release managers and that Evergreen 2.2.0 will released by June
8th.  He also explained the Evergreen developers' participation in the
Google Summer of Code project which will lead to some really nice
customizations when the individual projects are completed.   (Look for more
information about the Google Summer of Code project in an upcoming
newsletter, later this Summer.)

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT:  Community Meeting, by Lori Ayre, The Galecia Group

Lori Bowen Ayre led the community discussion.  Topics discussed included
finding ways to break out of the various "silos" the various Evergreen
committees and groups find themselves working in. For example, developers
tend to communicate on the IRC and the developers mailing list.  Plus there
are special mailing lists for DIG, the Web Team, Report Task Force, the
Oversight Board and (just announced) Catalogers. Also, many libraries are
gathering info about development work that they may undertake in the future
and sometimes there are duplicate efforts underway. Some working groups
didn't have any structure (e.g. a mailing list or working area on the web)
such as translators and Sys Admins.  And in some cases, we just plain needed
more people involved (e.g. on QA and user interface).  

Ideas for improving the feedback loops between various community members
that have arisen during the course of the conference are:  get the
newsletter going again (this will be implemented), do more community IRC
meetings, establish a community manager/coordinator, have the Release
Managers and Maintainers communicate more frequently on the General Mailing
list (this will be implemented), rework the website on a platform that is
easier for everyone to contribute to and which provides targeted areas for
communication and resource-sharing among and across all the different
working/interest/user groups.  An offer to host a "Technical Share Server"
by Equinox kicked off a lively discussion about the need for libraries to
step up and provide some community services  for ourselves.  

There was general consensus that we need to find a way to find a way to
connect the silos and keep relationships with everyone in the community
clear, transparent,  productive and consistent with our values. 

But what are our shared values? Here's what came up from the group:
openness, transparency, collaboration, sharing, respect, all contributions
are valued, creative ways to do old things, creating a quality experience
for patrons, the guiding principle is the user (where the users are patrons
and staff).  Also, to be crazy awesome!

The Web Team was tasked with sorting out the differences between "Interest
Groups" and "Working Groups" in terms of their purpose, what resources are
set-up for them (e.g. mailing lists, website space, wiki space).  In
addition, the Web Team will stage a proof-of-concept website using Drupal
to provide the communication and information resources (or at least a place
for them) needed by all the users identified during the Web Teams needs
assessment work (many of which are represented by the "silos" discussed
earlier).  The goal would be to make the website easier for all the user
communities  to find what they need, to communicate with each other and with
the larger community, and to share resources with one another. The new
Drupal stuff would not replace the wiki, just supplement it. The community
will be asked to provide feedback on the proof-of-concept site offered up by
the Web Team.

Finally, the group decided that a community purpose statement will be
drafted by a group of volunteers for feedback by the community.  Volunteers
were John Houser, Angela Kilsdonk, Jed Moffitt, and Beth Longwell.   



That's it for this conference edition.  I'll end with a couple of quotes
from two conference attendees:

 

"[I ] took away several things of value: new contacts who I can go to for
information, and who in return can come to me; the opportunity to help out
Equinox with their Millennium connector for Fulfillment, and important
information on networks and how they interact with Evergreen." - John Boggs,
Peninsula Library System

 

"From keynote to classes and even after hours, being at the Evergreen 2012
conference helped me to become more familiar with the system and the great
contributors to the project." - Tony Bandy, OHIONET

 

Registration is already open for the 2013 conference in Vancouver, British
Columbia:  http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/.  See you all there!  

 

 

 

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Amy Terlaga

Assistant Director, User Services

Bibliomation, Inc.

32 Crest Road

Middlebury, CT  06762

203-577-4070 x101

 <http://www.biblio.org/> www.biblio.org

 

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