[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen Newsletter / September-October 2012

Fri Oct 12 15:21:30 EDT 2012

Evergreen Newsletter / September-October 2012

The Evergreen Hack-A-Way

The first annual Evergreen Hack-a-Way is now underway in Duluth, Georgia and
is being sponsored by Equinox.  The goal of the Hack-A-Way is to provide an
opportunity, at the midway point each year between conferences, for
developers to meet in person and to continue the momentum they develop at
the conference.  This in person collaboration, while working on Evergreen
coding projects, is extremely useful.

In attendance are Dan Wells, Ben Shum, Thomas Berezansky, Rogan Hamby,
Dwayne Nance from NoveList, Bill Erickson, Mike Rylander, Lebbeous
Fogle-Weekly, Galen Charlton, Jason Etheridge, Chris Sharp, plus Dan Scott
and a few remote folks on the Google Hangout.

The agenda can be found here:

http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:hackfest:egfall2012

Look for an update on the Hack-A-Way in our next newsletter.

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FulfILLment Update
by Suzannah Lipscomb

The Pacific Library Partnership, consisting of three libraries in
California, has contracted with Equinox Software, Inc. to test FulfILLment.
The partnership consists of Los Gatos Public Library, Peninsula Library
System (the city of San Mateo only), and Santa Cruz Public Library.  These
libraries currently use Koha, Millennium, and Evergreen as their ILS.  Lori
Bowen Ayre, The Galecia Group, is serving as a consultant on this project as
part of the Open Source - Open Libraries project.  The partners will be
testing FulfILLment to see if it can meet their requirements for managing
physical item resource sharing between independent library systems.
FulfILLment was developed by Equinox developers with funding from OHIONET
and other development partners including:  the State Libraries of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, South Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and WiLS.  It is
anticipated that FulfILLment version 1.0-RC1 will be available in the
spring/summer of 2013.

FulfILLment is generally described as an open source ILL software, but it is
so much more.  It is an open source, regional resource-sharing system
between disparate ILS.  It was designed to bridge otherwise incompatible
software products so that different libraries can continue to use their
current ILS while obtaining many benefits enjoyed by libraries using
Evergreen in resource-sharing consortia.  The development of LAIs (Local
Automation Integrator) in FulfILLment makes this possible by allowing the
participating libraries to obtain bibliographic and other relevant
information from each library's current automation system and making this
information accessible over the internet.  FulfILLment is also scalable.  If
necessary, new custom LAIs can be developed in future versions of
FulfILLment to allow even more libraries to join and enjoy all that
FulfILLment has to offer.

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DIG Gathering

On Friday October 5th, six members of DIG got together at Berklee College of
Music in Boston, for what we hope will be become an at least annual
opportunity to collaborate face to face outside of the Evergreem conference.
In attendance we had Ben Shum, Kathy Lussier, Jim Keenan, Tim Spindler, June
Rayner, and Yamil Suarez. The main achievement of our gathering on Friday
was to do an inventory of what documentation sections exist in older
official documentation (EG 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2), but not in the 2.3
documentation. As well as tracking down what has made it to the 2.3
documentation already. One key issue that came up and that we tried to
research is that we would all like to find an automated way, instead of the
current manual way, to covert the older documentation that is formatted in
the DocBook format to the current AsciiDoc format.

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Evergreen Development - News

The Massachusetts Library Network is starting its next round of development
with a focus on improving the retrieval of search results in Evergreen. 

The MassLNC consortia have identified several possible enhancements for this
project and plan to seek quotes for development in October. The enhancements
MassLNC is pursuing are:

.         Allowing MARC Field Weighting in Relevance Ranking without
Breaking the Ability to Exclude Search Terms

.         Activity Metric for Relevance Algorithm

.         More Control Over Stemming

.         Synonym list for search terms

.         Ability to Browse by Author, Title and Subject

.         Staff-Friendly Call Number Browse

.         Traditional Operators for Boolean Searches

.         Simple method for excluding electronic resources from search
results

.         Expanded Facets

More detailed descriptions are available at
http://masslnc.cwmars.org/node/2550.

MassLNC is interested in hearing feedback on these enhancements from other
Evergreen libraries and in finding partners to help in sponsoring this work.
Send any comments along to Kathy Lussier at klussier at masslnc.org.

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The Bibliomation consortium has contracted with four different developers to
produce thirteen different enhancements.  To see a list of these
enhancements, go to http://biblio.org/2012/10/10/evergreen-enhancements/

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Niagara Evergreen Consortium is funding the porting of organizational unit
hiding in the JSPAC (Java Script OPAC) to the TPAC (Template Toolkit OPAC)
in Evergreen open source ILS.  They also originally funded this development
in the JSPAC.   Equinox developers are spearheading the development project.
Equinox anticipates that the coding will be completed no later than the end
of September.  Once the coding is complete, it will be submitted to the
Evergreen Community for inclusion in the next major release of Evergreen. 

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Evergreen Libraries - Update

Missouri Evergreen has gone live with 4 libraries implemented so far.
Poplar Bluff Public Library, Grundy County Library, Marshall Public Library
and Carrollton Public Library are all now sharing their materials through
the Missouri Evergreen Consortium.  MOBIUS, a nonprofit library consortium
based in Columbia, MO is hosting and managing Missouri Evergreen with LSTA
funds from the Missouri State Library.  Over the next year nine more
Missouri public libraries will be joining.  We hope to have more members
join over the next several years.

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SCLENDS is bringing up three new county library systems in October - Lee,
Clarendon and Lancaster counties.

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On August 9th, Mt. Gilead Public Library and Cardington-Lincoln Public
Library went live in COOL-CAT. Mt. Gilead and Cardington-Lincoln are the
fourth and fifth libraries to migrate into the system. They join Community
Library (Sunbury), Germantown Public Library, and Selover 
Public Library that migrated to COOL-CAT earlier this year.

COOL-CAT is the shared Evergreen catalog of the Consortium of Ohio
Libraries.

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

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

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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