The Evergreen Community blogs have lovely reflections on the 2011 International Evergreen Conference, so instead of echoing their fond sentiments (accurate as they may be), here is a quick run down of notable things we learned and/or noticed about growth of the Evergreen ILS and it’s surrounding community:
- Serials and acquisitions are becoming more mature. EDI ordering is possible and the serials interface, while currently functional, has planned development to make it even more streamlined and user friendly.
- The community is expanding rapidly. This was evidenced both by the numbers presented by Bob Molyneux at the opening session – see his related blog post – and by the number of new faces at the conference.
- A few cool ideas presented as either planned or existing development – software and otherwise – include: a repository of common serial patterns for use by the Evergreen community, completion of the FufILLment open source ILL system, an agreement with the Software Freedom Conservancy, and an effort to move to timed releases of new versions. For more on what the developers had to say, check out their slides from the closing session. Beyond these Evergreen-specific advances, Discovery Garden showcased their Lib20 appliance, which combines Evergreen with the Fedora digital repository software. The PALS office will be watching this project closely – as with all Evergreen-related development.
In 2010, we were impressed by the quality of of the Evergreen community. This year the quality remained high, but the numbers are what impressed us. There are more libraries live on Evergreen, more libraries investigating Evergreen, and more types of libraries in more countries represented. All of this combines to bring more features, more documentation, and more support to the Evergreen system. Although we cannot compare these experiences to what “might have been,” had we selected a different system, the Evergreen has lived up to, and perhaps exceeded, the expectations we had back in the summer of 2009.
