[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Total newbie would like some advice!

[Andy Helten]

We are also a small parochial school, K-8, with about 120 students.

I originally chose Evergreen for similar reasons to what you list: it 
appeared to be popular, appeared to be well-supported, and it is open 
source (like you, I have an extensive background with free software). 
All of these are still good reasons to choose Evergreen and, in fact, 
all of the are more attractive reasons today, for example, 
installation with Ubuntu 12.04/Evergreen 2.2.1 was about as easy as it 
gets which was not so true with Debian/Evergreen 1.6.0.4 just over two 
years ago.

We are on our third school year with Evergreen and are very happy with 
it. We started with 1.6.0.4 and jumped to 2.2.1 this summer. The 
upgrade of the software was easy but the upgrade of the database was 
more difficult for three reasons: (1) waited too long to do the 
upgrade, (2) I have virtually no experience with Postgres (or SQL for 
that matter), and (3) I have no inside knowledge of the workings of 
Evergreen. With some guidance from several folks on the Evergreen IRC, 
I was able to work through the database upgrade.

I was nearly regretting my choice of Evergreen during the database 
upgrade this summer but I gotta believe there will be similar problems 
with other software although the Evergreen database is probably more 
extensive and thus more difficult to updrade. Either way, I will no 
longer wait so long to upgrade which should help with this problem 
(most folks do smaller incremental upgrades so that a jump from 
1.6.0.4 to 2.2.1 is not a "typical" upgrade).

I don't run the library but I did initially learn enough to give some 
basic instructions to the librarian. She took it from there, added all 
of our books to the library, added student accounts, and has been very 
happy with it. She would be the first to agree that she is not 
technology savvy but she is a quick learner.

Summary: we are happy with Evergreen.

Andy


----------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *Michael Dodds <mdodds at doddstech.com>
*Sent: *Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:23:34 -0400
*To: *open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org
*Subject: *[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Total newbie would like some advice!

> Hi all,
>
> First of all, I hope this the correct list to be asking this. If 
> not, just point me to the right one.
>
> I recently took over IT support for a small parochial school, K3-8.  
> They have an ancient version of Winnebago Spectrum that is sort-of 
> running. Apparently it hasn't actually worked correctly since it was 
> installed. Since budgets are always tight, and I have a good 
> background in Free software I started researching some alternatives. 
> Evergreen and OpenBiblio kept popping up. Since I live in Georgia, I 
> was familiar with Evergreen's customized brother PINES, but I had 
> some concerns about whether I would be driving a tack with a 
> sledgehammer using Evergreen with a single small library.
>
> Through some searching, I found a press release that the Kent 
> County, MD library system, which, while not as small as mine, is a 
> smallish system, had adopted Evergreen in 2008. I called them this 
> morning and talked to a very nice lady there, who among other things 
> serves as tier 1 support for their system and she has been very 
> happy with it overall.
>
> Are there any other users out there using Evergreen in a single 
> library who would be willing to share their experience with it?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
> -- 
>
> *Michael Dodds*
> *Doddstech.com*
> *1390 Excalibur Dr.*
> *Macon, GA 31220*
> *478-314-4119*
> *mdodds at doddstech.com*
>

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