[Open Source ILS] Questions
Judy Van Acker
I wanted to get the ball rolling on questions we should be asking
ourselves about the feasibility of implementing a model similar to
Georgia Pines.
I guess I am trying to wrap my brain around what the model would look
like in Colorado.
Here are a few questions off the top of my head.
Would there be one place to hold all records, and where would that reside?
What would be the cost of implementing an Open Source ILS in CO.?
There were a few comments on the audio about LibLime suppport being
just as expensive as what we have now. Would support be less if we
went locally (pooled our IT resources) or if we had a company like
LibLime do the work for us?
Can individual libraries customize their site or will all libraries
have the same interface?
In one of the articles it stated that all libraries adhered to the
same policies. I don't know if I read that wrong, but a red flag
starting waving in my head on that one.
Are there any other Open Source ILS models that include multi-type
libraries in a consortium?
Would we have to wait until we had all the features to attract
multi-type libraries in order to proceed with initiating the project?
Why did one entire county in Georgia decide not to join the Georgia
Pines Open Source ILS project?
Eager to hear what everyone else thinks,
Judy Van Acker - Director
John C. Fremont Library
Florence, CO. 81226
719/784-4649 ext #4
Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We
have only this
moment, sparkling like a star in our hand --
and melting like a snowflake. ~ Marie Beynon Ray
On Nov 13, 2007 12:56 PM, Jim Duncan <dunc...@cde.state.co.us> wrote:
>
> Be warned: looooong download (23 MB). Audio quality isn't fantastic,
> so don't expect studio quality, ok?
>
> The audio recording from the TechForum webinar/town hall meeting can
> be found at:
>
> http://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/opensource/TechForum_Open-Source-ILS_Webinar.mp3
>
> Thanks for offering to put a copy on your server, Bob! Please point us
> in that direction when it's available.
>
> -Jim
>
> On Nov 12, 3:25 pm, "Pasicznyuk, Bob (IT)"
> <bpasiczn...@dclibraries.org> wrote:
> > Point me to the light and I'll head there.
> >
> >
>
>
>
> >
>
--
J
Lori
have a few to add.
What is the operating budget for Georgia Pines?
The cost savings benefits have been mentioned a great deal in the
articles. I would like to see the data and raw figures.
What sort of migration headaches, obstacles, time period, costs, etc.
have the member libraries encountered?
What is the development schedule for the Serials and Acquistions
modules?
I addition to the more broad questions, I have a ton of granular type
quesitons. For example:
barcodes, both patron and item barcodes
-are there problems with duplicates?
-does there need to be a standard format for all libraries?
RFID
-how many libraries are using Evergreen & RFID?
-any problems?
printing
-I know the Evergreen site mentions customizable label and receipt
printing, are there other customizable templates for printing
bibliographic records, patron information, etc.
-is any printer compatible?
-any problems
These are just a handful of questions. Does anyone else have any
questions?
Thanks!
Lori
> On Nov 13, 2007 12:56 PM, Jim Duncan <dunca...@cde.state.co.us> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Be warned: looooong download (23 MB). Audio quality isn't fantastic,
> > so don't expect studio quality, ok?
>
> > The audio recording from the TechForum webinar/town hall meeting can
> > be found at:
>
> >http://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/opensource/TechForum_Open-Sourc...
>
> > Thanks for offering to put a copy on your server, Bob! Please point us
> > in that direction when it's available.
>
> > -Jim
>
> > On Nov 12, 3:25 pm, "Pasicznyuk, Bob (IT)"
> > <bpasiczn...@dclibraries.org> wrote:
> > > Point me to the light and I'll head there.
>
> --
> J- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Jim Duncan
Wild! Lori and I just talked yesterday about launching the questions
discussion, and it looks like you were thinking along the same lines.
Great!!
So, no need for me to "formally" start the discussion. You've done it!
Here are questions I have:
On a statewide ILS - if this was NOT a vendor hosted solution
situation and was created in-state...----------------
What kind of data center would be necessary to provide support for a
statewide ILS?
Physical space? Hardware? Networking?
How many staff members?
What kind of skills would they need to have?
Would it be primarily a tech shop, or would there be a need for
training/education/support team as well?
On a statewide ILS - if this WAS a hosted solution
situation...----------------
Considering the vendor/support companies working in this market space,
what would the list of questions we would ask those vendors look like?
How similar or different would it be to the questions we would ask any
ILS vendor?
On costs...-----------------
Capital (startup costs)?
Annual operations costs? Broken out to...
Personnel costs (including benefits, travel, etc.)?
Technology costs (which is pretty broad...)?
On culture...----------------
Is CO ready?
What are some of the broad, resource-sharing benefits of a
cooperatively-created, statewide ILS?
What are some of the tradeoffs that libraries would make in joining a
consortium like this?
-Jim
On Nov 14, 8:26 am, "Judy Van Acker" <jfvanac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 12:56 PM, Jim Duncan <dunca...@cde.state.co.us> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Be warned: looooong download (23 MB). Audio quality isn't fantastic,
> > so don't expect studio quality, ok?
>
> > The audio recording from the TechForum webinar/town hall meeting can
> > be found at:
>
> >http://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/opensource/TechForum_Open-Sourc...
Cookie Wolfrom
http://techessence.info/manifesto/
Roy Tenant's Library Software Manifesto is offered in an attempt to
rationalize the relationship between libraries and library systems vendors,
which is presently unhealthy. First done at a talk at the 2007 CODI
Conference (Customers of Dynix, Inc.). his topic was a "library software
manifesto" in which he would outline the rights and responsibilities of
libraries and library software vendors.
Some food for thought as we enter into all this....Cookie
Gem Stone-Logan
Would it be primarily a tech shop, or would there be a need for
training/education/support team as well?
I guess in some cases, training needs on a state level would broil down to what resources each library has available to them already. It's my job to learn our ILS and then support and explain it to staff. However, many libraries don't have the resources to devote one person to this task.
Gem Stone-Logan
IT Application Engineer
Weld Library District
http://www.mylibrary.us/
phasefx
an Evergreen support/development/hosting company. I'll try to answer
some of the questions you've posed, at least in the context of PINES
and Evergreen:
> Can individual libraries customize their site or will all libraries have the same interface?
their public catalogs (and even their staff clients), based on either
IP-address or URL mangling. Currently this isn't as easy to do as I'd
like, but it'll be easier with the next OPAC revision. The PINES
consortium in Georgia doesn't do this because they want a common
patron experience, though most of the libraries do have their own
unique portal pages (which are not a part of Evergreen).
> In one of the articles it stated that all libraries adhered to the same policies. I don't know if I read that wrong, but a red flag starting waving in my head on that one.
previous ILS. With the development of Evergreen, one of our mantras
has always been "Software should not dictate policy", but I think it's
going to be a while before the PINES libraries realize everything
Evergreen is capable of, and revisits every one of their policies and
determines which ones were forced by their previous software. How we
define business logic in Evergreen is very flexible and separated from
other parts of the system. You can have drastic policy differences
between individual libraries. One of our developer in-jokes is that
you could base circulation rules on phases of the moon in Evergreen,
if you really wanted to. :) But we try very hard to push folks away
from overloading fields with information that should be orthogonal and
placed into separate fields, or from storing redundant information.
For example, you don't "need" to base circ/hold rules on "item
types" (in Evergreen these are "Circ Modifiers'), and can instead use
actual data from the bib records for determining behavior.
The only real limitation here is that Evergreen isn't designed to
allow overlapping/duplication barcodes between library cards (cards
are distinct from patrons in this system), and between cataloged
items. It uses a single conceptual database. But you could run
multiple instances of Evergreen if you wanted to do this.
> Why did one entire county in Georgia decide not to join the Georgia Pines Open Source ILS project?
all of which, relatively speaking, have plenty of money, so the cost-
angle isn't as important to them. The patron-benefit-angle is still
relevant, as intra-PINES-lending is faster and more efficient than
traditional ILL and patrons get to leverage the "long tail" of a
virtual collection, but I think some of the hold-outs are afraid that
the smaller libraries will "leech" all of their popular holdings. In
practice, this hasn't been the case for the PINES libraries, and a
large percentage of holds are for unique items held by smaller
libraries (the long tail in action).
Some of these libraries are considering Evergreen, however, outside
the context of the statewide consortium. Membership in PINES is
totally voluntary. I'm in favor of the PINES model, but you could
have all of your libraries on their own Evergreen instances, and still
get economy of scale from an IT perspective by managing the software
and infrastructure centrally. But patrons really do benefit when you
break down barriers. Your funding may be based on geography and local
concerns, but your patrons don't really care about that, and are more
and more used to being able to get information and resources globally,
thanks in a large part to the Internet. I'm all for consortia that
patrons can perceive as one large library.
>What is the development schedule for the Serials and Acquistions modules?
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=acq:timeline
We're pushing for a 1.0 release in April of 2008. We're also (still
and always) looking for input from domain experts. I know the purpose
of this group is research, but if you can get involved with
development, even if just by virtue of spending a few hours talking
with the developers, that'll give you a good opportunity to see how
open source development can really work. So if anyone wants to
"experiment" with helping us out, let me know! Of course, by doing
this research in the open, you're already affecting your research
subjects, but I'm not complaining at all. :)
>I addition to the more broad questions, I have a ton of granular type quesitons. For example:
have public forums that could field questions like these very well,
with the added benefit that the answers are archived and potentially
shared with other parties interested in Evergreen: http://open-ils.org/listserv.php
Feel free to join us there! However, I'll try to keep my toe in this
community as well.
>barcodes, both patron and item barcodes
>-are there problems with duplicates?
installation, though you could run multiple Evergreen instances (and
with such things as virtualization, user-mode linux, etc. and of
course, Evergreen vendors selling hosting services, that's not as
difficult as it might sound).
In PINES, a patron may return an item to any PINES library, and it'll
get routed back to the owning library (if it's not captured for a
hold, etc.). This wouldn't be practical on the scale of PINES if the
libraries could have overlapping barcodes and had to specify the
library for the item before scanning the barcode.
That said, if this is something you really need (and I know re-
barcoding would be daunting), there are ways you can get it. I'd
suggest talking about it on the OPEN-ILS-DEV mailing list, to pull in
other libraries that might also need this.
>-does there need to be a standard format for all libraries?
interfaces offer optional barcode validation, and if enabled,
Evergreen uses Codabar for this. However, we could support different
and multiple algorithms, given an explanation of the algorithms. :D
>RFID
>-how many libraries are using Evergreen & RFID?
->any problems?
libraries using 3M RFID and Checkpoint RFID. Each of these
communicate with Evergreen via SIP2. Incidentally, both Evergreen and
Koha share the same main code for SIP2 (that's a major benefit of open
source, that sort of sharing).
There has been a problem with Checkpoint RFID and network timeouts,
which is currently under investigation.
>printing
>-I know the Evergreen site mentions customizable label and receipt
>printing, are there other customizable templates for printing
>bibliographic records, patron information, etc.
records, bills, items, holds, circulations, etc. can be printed and
templated within the same framework (which is basically HTML markup
and some "macros" for variable interpolation of actual data fields).
However, for bib records the template options aren't very rich (you
can't get at arbitrary fields in the MARC). This is likely to change
to something better soon. However, there is a REST service that will
let you take any given bib record and spit it out in various XML
formats, like MARC-XML or MODS, and you could apply CSS, XSLT, or some
other method to create a custom printable document.
>-is any printer compatible?
This should be the case, but there's no practical way to prove it. :)
If your operating system can print to a given printer through its
standard printing mechanism, then so can the staff client. In the
case of spine/pocket label printing, we send a form feed after each
label, so it's up to your print driver to handle such things as a 5 by
3 page of labels.
>-any problems
The staff client doesn't currently support incremental printing, so a
receipt will print all at once when you have finished checking out to
a patron, rather than print a line as each item is scanned. With
older receipt printers, it can take a long time to print a receipt for
a large number of items. Since a lot of PINES libraries can't afford
to buy modern receipt printers, incremental printing is also on my
short list (I'm the main staff client developer).
With spine/pocket label printing, a lot of PINES libraries are using
Okidata dot-matrix printers, and these can be real picky with
alignment issues for printing in batch, and appears to vary by printer
and label type. The staff client also overrides local hardware
settings for those specific printers as far as what font-weight to
use, which can be a problem. You can export your labels to external
programs like Microsoft Word or OCLC's LabelMe if need be, but this is
another thing I want to work on, adding lower-level support (command
codes, etc.) for those print interfaces.
Let me know if this helps, or if you have any other questions.
Thanks!
--
Jason Etheridge
| VP, Community Support and Advocacy
| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
| phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: ja...@esilibrary.com
| web: http://www.esilibrary.com