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

[Claire]

Thanks Joe!

Definitely helpful, and I'll add Openbiblio to my list. Being able to
retrieve information quickly from a database is definitely important, as it
would save a lot of time. For the installation of Evergreen, if I decide to
go with that, I have access to a system administration who would be happy
to help me out if I run into any trouble during the installation, so that
would be alright!

Cheers, Claire


On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 8:10 AM, Joe <knuevejo at oplin.org> wrote:

>  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 45327937-855-4001knuevejo 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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