The website is http://rscel.org and it is for the Resource and Sharing Cooperative of Evergreen Libraries. Its just getting going and the effort is largely funded by a three year grant from the IMLS. You just may want to get yourself involved….

http://openlib.org/home/krichel/courses/lis508p10w/

All 17 of his students were successful…wanna give it a go?

You can get the product for only $79 if your library meets these conditions:

• Annual operating budget of $1 million USD or less
• Your library is a 501(c)(3) or is listed in the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) database

Check it out!

Dan Scott held an Evergreen Developer Workshop at FSOSS 2009 in Toronto, Canada.  Robert Soulliere from Mohawk College has uploaded videos of the workshop to Archive.org, splitting the talk into 9 segments. Dan has also put his workshop materials online. There’s an HTML versionwith written details and, for the extra keen, there’s a also a tarball that contains the HTML version plus the code used in the examples and Dan’s slides.

This info courtesy of the Evergreen Newsletter which is sent out to subscribers of the Evergreen general discussion list, development list.  It is also available on the Evergreen blog.

Registration information is below, and the sessions are as follows (all times are in Pacific Time Zone):

More on the conference including links to registration

From a session at the 2009 Califa Vendor Fair on the Open Source – Open Libraries Consortium.  There was no formal presentation.  Instead, attendees were asked to choose the topics to be addressed in the short session.  PPT slides were used to help answer those questions.  Handouts that were available are included as the last three pages of the attached PDF.

YouChooseSlide

Attendees Chose The Topic to be Addressed from this Slide

An economist is conducting research on the housing market financial collapse. She needs raw economic data as well as secondary data, policy documents, and a host of other materials available in print and electronic form. Her campus uses OLE, which manages all campus collections and information-resource subscriptions and is also integrated into the campus learning management system (LMS), the accounting, human resources and student systems, and other major technology systems—as well as several consortia to which the library or the campus belongs, such as OCLC and the Hathi Trust.

Moving toward a draft document, she transfers materials into a word processor. Thanks to OLE, each arrives with full bibliographic metadata attached and ready to auto-format (via tools such as Zotero) into a form suitable for the academic journal she is targeting. When she is ready to share, she stores a copy of the draft in her institutional repository (via an OLE-aware interface) and sends a link to her various academic (social) networking venues, to invite public comment.

The following four issues (fears) often come up for people when they first start looking into an OSLS (open source library system):

1. Total Cost of Ownership (Don’t  OSLS products really cost more by the time you hire the staff you need to run them?)
2. Features (I understand OSLS products don’t have all the features of a mature ILS product.)
3. User Friendliness (An open source system will be too hard for our customers to use.)
4. Difficult to Deploy (There’s no way our staff could install and implement an open source ILS on their own!)

The following four excerpts address these issues very effectively.   I hope you’ll read the entire Leggott article but in case you don’t, at least read these excerpts!

Abram: The open source proponents state that it has a much lower price and a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What they tend to leave out, however, are the entry costs of switching systems.

Leggott:  Open source does (in my experience) have a much lower TCO. As one example, UPEI moved from the SD Unicorn ILS to Evergreen in just over 2 months, including buying new hardware, hiring a contractor and acquiring a 1-year Equinox platinum support agreement for LESS than what we paid for a year’s maintenance for Unicorn. With what was left over we paid developers to add some functionality to Evergreen, some of which found its way back to the project. That kind of giving back to the community feature of open source is hard to assign a value to, but it is many times greater than the effort you typically put into a closed proprietary system, further enhancing the TCO of open source.

<…>

Abram: Generally, the available open source ILS platforms have less than half of the features and functions of any SirsiDynix ILS.

Leggott: The great benefit of open source products is that they are part of a rich and vibrant ecosystem where you are free to mix and match products to suit your local needs. While the current Evergreen does not have the same full functionality as the flavour-of-the-month-SD ILS (e.g. no serials management), UPEI was able to construct a BETTER for us ILS ecosystem by using the CUFTS open source system to manage all our serials – print and digital. This would be a challenge, or downright impossible, with a system like Unicorn. The Library community does not need more closed ILS systems, we need more OLAFs – Open Library Applications Frameworks. A better way to make this statement would be “The available open source ILS frameworks will always have more features and functions than any SD ILS.”

<…>

Abram:  Proprietary software is much more user-friendly.

Leggott:  Hmmm. One of the most interesting outcomes of our switch from Unicorn to Evergreen was the comments our student assistants made when they came back from summer break and discovered a new ILS: This software is a lot easier to use. Our staff training with Evergreen also took a fraction of the time it did with the switch to Unicorn.

<…>

Abram: Is open source harder to deploy?

Leggott:  No. Our implementation of Evergreen took a fraction of the time that Unicorn did at UPEI. Also, because we are proactively investing staff time and money in more useful open source/LAMP type skills, our staff can easily install most open source software stacks, giving us a great deal of flexibility. At UPEI all our current software applications (with the exception of RefWorks and desktop OS) are open source. We also have created a world-class open source framework called Islandora, all with a full-time staff complement of 26 and a systems staff of 4. Encouraging a staff to be fluent with open source tools and philosophies is the best way to transform your library.

The history of the article, the article itself and links to many excellent retorts have been aggregated on this Code4Lib wiki page.

via Open Source – Open Libraries

#4: Maximize the effectiveness of your most costly technology investment — your people. As technology itself falls in price per unit, your staff is likely to get more expensive. So pay attention to what is required to make the most effective use of them. This means getting them the training and resources they need to do their job well. I can’t believe how many administrators skimp on hardware and make their staff make do with inadequate amounts of RAM and processors when they are the least expensive part of the equation. Believe me, you do not want your most expensive resource sitting around waiting for your least expensive resource to boot up.

via The Top Ten Things Library Administrators Should Know About Technology | TechEssence.info.