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

[Joe]

Hi Claire.

The good news is that I am fairly certain that all of your must have and 
would like to have features are possible in Evergreen.
My one question for you would be, how is your experience level with 
linux/unix?  Getting Evergreen installed and configured requires a 
fairly robust knowledge of a command line unix type environment and 
Postgre SQL.

Another program you may want to consider if the installation process for 
Evergreen looks too daunting is Openbiblio.  The primary advantage of it 
over Evergreen is that if you are already familiar with a Windows 
environment and have a computer running it you can install it very 
quickly on such a system and be up and running with a minimal amount of 
hair pulling.  That said, some features that are integrated into 
Evergreen are add-ons for Openbiblio, so it's possible that some of the 
functionality you are looking for would not work as well in openbiblio 
as in Evergreen.
An important example of this is z39.50 integration.  z39.50 is the 
protocol by which you can search other catalogs and download their 
records for items you own rather than writing up records by hand. (a 
necessity in my mind for anything more than a handful of items..).  I 
believe this is a core feature in Evergreen, where as in openbiblio it 
is an add-on package.

I hope this has helped in some small way.

Have a good day.

Joe

Joseph Knueven
Director
Germantown Public Library
51 N. Plum St.
Germantown, OH 45327
937-855-4001
knuevejo at oplin.org

On 6/15/2013 2:39 AM, Claire 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

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