[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Some questions about using Evergreen for a private library

[Rogan Hamby]

Hi Claire,

I'll respond to your questions to the best of my ability and others may
chime in.  Evergreen handles a lot of diverse needs and scales so mileage
and opinions vary.  It does require some technical skills to manage.  I'm
the Operations Director for SCLENDS, a geographical distributed consortium
of public libraries in South Carolina.

Capacity - I deal with millions of holdings so I can say safely that it can
handle your growth to 10,000. :)

LoC - We mostly use Dewey but Evergreen can handle different classification
schemes.

Searching - no problem.

Printing - I'm not sure what you mean by barcode printing.  Barcodes as
used on items we usually buy from a vendor.  But, you certainly can print
your own barcodes if you want.  There are fonts available for codabar and
other popular barcode formats but you may need to do some investigation to
accomplish what you want.  Label printing has a lot of different approaches
but Evergreen prints to any standard printer so any windows label printer
will work.  Personally, I'm not fond of the built in support for label
printing in Evergreen but we add thousands of items every week with labels
printed out of Evergreen so obviously the workflow is viable.

Most barcode scanners work as keyboard inputs by the operating system
so compatibility is an issue to resolve with your machine that staff client
is on not with Evergreen.  In other words, if you have the staff client
running on Windows 8 make sure the barcode scanner gives keyboard input
(99.9% chance it does) and it works with Windows and you're golden.

When you say accessing content online you're talking about some kind of
discovery layer.  The most common convention is probably what is usually
called an OPAC or Online Public Access Catalog.  Evergreen has one built on
top of Apache.  There are plenty of examples around including SCLENDS'
www.sclends.lib.sc.us

When you say "access something" to get a books' information you're talking
about what libraries generally call copy cataloging.  That's a big subject
to get into.  The normal way of doing this is via Z39.50 and some common
targets for searching and importing MARC records from are built into
Evergreen.  More can be configured and added.

The last suggested function can be done but really isn't in Evergreen's
domain, most couple Evergreen with another product to accomplish that.

With all this said, it sounds like the product you're looking for would
handle a pretty small collection and it doesn't sound like you're familiar
with many library conventions.  The threshold for learning how to install,
configure and do all this in Evergreen will be pretty high and that's
assuming you  have the Linux skills to do the technical work.  You mention
a host system that already exists that you want to put this on - if it's
not Linux ... well, in theory you could rewrite Evergreen to run on Windows
but I'm not sure I know anyone who would sign on for that project.

If you're a Windows user I would heartily recommend that you look into some
of the personal library management tools that are available as
free/share/cheap ware out there and connect to web services for accessing
your collection.  There may even be entirely cloud based ones available.



On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 2:39 AM, Claire <spam4claire at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Evergreen users/developers,
>
> I have a few questions about using Evergreen to manage a private library
> collection. Would anyone do me the favor of advising me about how good of a
> match Evergreen is for my needs? So far, if I understand the website
> description correctly, most of the features I'm interested in seem
> available, but I'm not sure.
>
> These are the basic features I'm looking for:
>
>    - System for a private library. Currently something like 2000-3000
>    books, but I would like something with the capacity for at least 10,000
>    books to accommodate future growth.
>    - Needs to use Library of Congress classification, not Dewey.
>    - Be able to search by ISBN, title, author, keywords, and year
>    - Be able to print labels/barcodes
>    - Be compatible with some kind of bar code scanner that I can buy
>
> Features that are not essential but that I would like to have:
>
>    - A way to access the content online (I could host it on my own
>    website if I had the code) so that I or other users could access it
>    elsewhere.
>    - If it's possible, a way to access something like Worldcat, Google
>    Books or some other database to generate the book's title, author, etc.
>    Essentially, I would like to be able to just enter the ISBN and have most
>    of the information pop up, to save some of the time getting them all in the
>    database. (OPAC?)
>    - I would like to host the system on a computer on which I keep PDFs
>    of articles on a hard drive. It would be great if the catalog software
>    could hold a catalog of articles as well, and if I could simply create a
>    link directly from each article's entry to the file on the hard drive.
>    (obviously wouldn't be available online unless I host the articles online
>    as well, though I could also do that)
>
> I would greatly appreciate any advice you might have. Any chance all of
> these features are a possibility in Evergreen?
>
> Thank you!
>
> Claire
>



-- 

Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA
Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services,
York County Library System

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit
me."
-- C.S. Lewis <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1069006.C_S_Lewis>
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