[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Olly olly oxen free: users of Evergreen APIs, stand up and be counted

[Galen Charlton]

[This morning I posted the following to the Evergreen community blog.
Please distribute widely.]

Does your project, service, or product interact with Evergreen in some
automated fashion?  If so, we’d like to hear from you.

I’m using the phrase “automated fashion” very broadly.  There are many
ways to receive data from an Evergreen system, update data in an
Evergreen database, or make transactions happen.  A few of these ways
include:

- XML-RPC calls to invoke Evergreen service methods
- SIP2 to perform patron and circulation requests
- Z39.50, unAPI, and OpenSearch to retrieve catalog data
- MARC exports and imports
- Screen-scraping (although if you’re screen-scraping Evergreen, we
may be able to suggest a better way to do it)
- Interacting with the Evergreen staff client
- Direct database access
- And others

Some of the things we’d like to know include:

- The name of your service or product
- What it does for an Evergreen library
- How it is accessing Evergreen
- Whether there are specific APIs or entry points that your
application depends on
- If there are things that Evergreen could be doing to make your life easier

We want to hear from everybody, whether you are a consortium that has
integrated Evergreen with other software, an Evergreen support group,
a vendor providing products or services to libraries, or a member of a
free software project whose software talks with Evergreen.  If you
work for an Evergreen library and know that Evergreen works with
another service, we want to hear from you too, even if you don’t know
how Evergreen is doing the talking.

Why do we want to know?  Our reasons include:

- Finding out which entry points we should be particularly careful
about changing as Evergreen gets enhanced.
- Seeing if there are things we could be doing better to encourage
more people and applications to participate in the Evergreen
ecosystem.
- (Maybe) putting together a list of third-party services that
interact with Evergreen.

To respond, please comment on the blog post at
http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=966

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
http://evergreen-ils.org