Evergreen at The Perl Conference

Lightning talk at The Perl Conference in Orlando on 22 June 2016

Transcript

1. One Library... Image credit: Boston Public Library via https://twitter.com/bplboston/status/605467338859786241
2. … cannot hold all the books Image credit: Cincinnati Public Library
3. Libraries banding together
4. Enter Evergreen
5. The “other” Perl ILS • You may remember Ruth Bavousett's lighting talk about Koha • Evergreen's (mostly) written in Perl too!
6. What's an ILS? • Search engine • CRM • Inventory system • Organizer of all the good metadata • Protector of all the library patron secrets
7. Why contribute? • Interesting problems – Library metadata search – Resource sharing networks – Scalability via an XMPP based message queue (OpenSRF) • Friendly community • Libraries and free software share many values
8. Join the library forest! https://evergreen-ils.org
9. One Library... Image credit: Boston Public Library via https://twitter.com/bplboston/status/605467338859786241 Hello, my name is Galen Charlton. I work for Equinox Software, a firm that develops and supports open source software for libraries, and I'd like to talk about a problem libraries have. Namely, we canna break the laws of physics!!! Libraries aren't just about books, but they sure do have a lot of them....
10. … cannot hold all the books Image credit: Cincinnati Public Library … but never enough … No one building cannot store them all … nor can one group of taxpayers buy them all. Running out of books to read is sad. If I'm a patron of your library... I don't care if you have a million books, if you don't have the one I want to read.
11. Libraries banding together However, libraries libraries can make us happy? How? By sharing all the things! If your library in Orlando does not have the eigth Harry Potter novel (c'mon, we know J.K. Rowling will eventually give in to temptation and actually write it), but my library in Miami does... library resource consortia can make it possible to get your hands on that book! Request it, have the libraries ship it around, get it ==> and at no cost to you.
12. Enter Evergreen Back in 2004, the Georgia Public Library Service had a problem – too much money for a proprietary library catalog, not enough functionality. GPLS decided to take a brave step: write an open source system design for consortia! In late 2006... Evergreen went live on an unsuspecting world.
13. The “other” Perl ILS • You may remember Ruth Bavousett's lighting talk about Koha • Evergreen's (mostly) written in Perl too! You may be feeling a bit of deja vu if you remember Ruth Bavousett's lightning talk a few years ago. Yes... Koha, the ILS from New Zealand, has a younger sibling.
14. What's an ILS? • Search engine • CRM • Inventory system • Organizer of all the good metadata • Protector of all the library patron secrets What is an ILS, or an integrated library system? It is the swiss army chainsaw of libraries. It is a search engine – of the library catalog It is a CRM – keeping track of library users and their stuff. It is an inventory system. It organizes all of the good metadata (the NSA not invited here!) And it protects library patron's data. (Time was, the FBI really did try to snoop on library records).
15. Why contribute? • Interesting problems – Library metadata search – Resource sharing networks – Scalability via an XMPP based message queue (OpenSRF) • Friendly community • Libraries and free software share many values Why would you, J Random Perlhacker, want to contribute to Evergreen? For one thing, it has some interesting problems to tackle: how to manage a pile of metadata. How to manage shipping library resources around... efficiently. How to manage a scalable application using an XMPP-based message queue called OpenSRF. We have a friendly community, and libraries and free software folks share many values. From openness comes strength.
16. Join the library forest! https://evergreen-ils.org