welcome to the community
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to …
Evergreen International Conference 2015
Hood River Oregon
“It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.”
Jeremy BenthamBritish Philosopher, Social Reformer
What is the Evergreen Community?
The Evergreen community is made up
of institutions and people who use
and/or support the Evergreen ILS and
choose to interact with others in the
community. We are diverse.
Georgia (PINES) on My Mind
Released under the GNU Public License (GPL)
Anyone can use and modify it.
Anyone can publish their extensions.
Who is my vendor?
“I’ve heard that…I need a full time developer on staff."
Not true.
The good news is, you don’t need a technical person or a developer on staff to USE the product, but you might need some help getting it set up and there are vendors who can and will provide services for data migration, installation, system reviews, training, all the way to full hosting and help desk support.
And there's no vendor lock in!
"I've heard that.... Evergreen doesn't have feature X."
Not true.
The best part? You can find out for yourself. Live demos, download the software, ask other users via IRC or the mailing list… or go to the conference!
All the features (and foibles) are well documented and publicly available.
"I've heard that... Evergreen will save my library $800k per year!"
Maybe?
Probably not immediately. There are costs to any software change, like data migration, data clean up, training, etc.
But… as time goes on, most libraries have seen moderate to significant cost savings. For small libraries that might be $15k per year, for large consortia it might be $300k per year.
"I've heard that... any 16-year-old can change the code!"
(sigh)
No.
Anyone has the right to download, use, and modify the code for their own purposes. But the Evergreen project has strict rules (as all mature open source projects do) about who can commit changes to the master Evergreen code base.
Because of the public visibility of all commits, I believe the open source development method is much better for product development than the proprietary method and results in better code.
Community Groups
• Evergreen Oversight Board
• Documentation Interest Group
• Evergreen Web Team
• Evergreen Outreach Committee
• Evergreen Reports Interest Group
• Evergreen Cataloging Working Group
• Acquisitions Interest Group
Website
evergreen-ils.org
Listservs
General – anything goes!
Developers – code talk & sysadmins
Search the listservs:
http://georgialibraries.markmail.org/search/?q=
How to participate
• 3 ways to participate
• No programming skills needed
• Link to detailed presentation…
https://goo.gl/bRLeSK
3 ways to participate
• Documentation
• Bug reports
• IRC
https://goo.gl/bRLeSK