Hello again Evergreen mailing list! Just wanted to make a public announcement that the regional library of Joensuu has decided to have Evergreen as our ILS-of-choice. We will have EG in production by/during the year 2014. It was a tough battle between Koha and Evergreen, where according to our requirements specification, Evergreen lost by 1 point of 470. Regardless of the much larger technical difficulties perceived in adapting, maintaining and developing Evergreen, we found the consortial model to be crucial for our library needs. Our consortium will include the whole province of North-Carelia (ca. 200 000 residents). We have around 20 branches and 4 municipal libraries that need to be joined together, with the promises of Southern Central Finland joining us with equal amount of branches. We are already starting the localization process by outsourcing the Launchpad translation and aim to complete it by the end of June. Hopefully by then our Fenno-American cousins can enjoy their Evergreen in Finnish. Currently the main challenges are to finish with our Software Requirements Specification(SRS), which is around 55% complete. Make more detailed plans for the database migrations, for which we need to migrate three different systems, and have more expertise in understanding the Evergreen development workflow. To that end I was planning to participate in the Google Summer of Code. We will host the servers and databases, do the migrations and set up Library settings by ourselves. Community support will however play a critical role with the success of our project. And we are willing to pay for it. It is unclear as to what extent, but propably will require participation during UTC/GMT +2 working hours or even moving to Finland. It might be possible to hire a Evergreen specialist for the duration of 6 months to 1 year. We also have plans for Evergreen improvements and would like to discuss about how to integrate them to the master branch. We have reserved 47000€ for the improvement of services and it might be best to start thinking ahead on how to implement, and in what timeframe, the changes we prioritize, if possible. And possibly make joint efforts with existing development teams. Once the SRS will come closer to completion, I will translate it to English and publish it.
-- Olli-Antti Kivilahti Open Library 2013 Library of Joensuu
