Evergreen ILS: Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS
Charlene Barina December 24th, 2006
A story of librarians developing an open-source ILS named Evergreen for the Georgia Public Library Service - pretty impressive that they use it to power
“44 different public library systems in 123 counties covering almost the entire state of Georgia — 252 member libraries in all. The system has 8.8 million items in its index and 1.6 million active cardholders. In fiscal year 2006, there were almost half a million loans made between its libraries.”
They run it on a Linux cluster using Apache and PostgreSQL, among other open source technologies.
Another choice quote:
“I think that’s the biggest frustration we hear from all of our library colleagues,” Walker says. In the past, if you requested a change, she says, “you went into an ‘enhancements queue,’ and the member base voted on it, and it took a really long time — if ever. There aren’t very many consortiums of 252 public libraries, so what we wanted a lot of times wasn’t what the rest of the customers wanted, so it got real frustrating waiting for things to happen.”
I first saw this in slashdot (which is interesting mostly for the commentary) here. For the whole article, check out the original article on linux.com.
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