I mentioned a few months back that Sitka has been working on integrating Overdrive's API into the Evergreen OPAC -- specifically, using the Overdrive API to allow patrons to checkout and place holds (and view checkouts/holds, suspend or cancel holds, etc.) on Overdrive titles directly within the OPAC. Our code for this is currently in production for one of our libraries, and I'm expecting a couple more of our libraries to go live with it in the next few weeks.
It's not fully documented yet, but the code is available here: http://git.sitka.bclibraries.ca/gitweb/?p=sitka/overdrive-evergreen-opac.git;a=summary Build and install instructions are outlined in the README. As currently implemented, this is a Javascript-based add-on or overlay to the existing OPAC. Actual changes to Evergreen are minimal: basically, we add a setting to config.tt2 which, if enabled, includes an overdrive.tt2 file which pulls in the OD API Javascript, as seen here: http://git.sitka.bclibraries.ca/gitweb/?p=sitka/evergreen.git;a=commitdiff;h=f8d5d13 One downside of this project in its current form is that it introduces new dependencies, particularly jQuery and require.js. It's also written in Coffeescript and requires a recent release of node.js to be compiled to Javascript (in my experience it will compile with the packaged version of node on Ubuntu 14.04, but not 12.04). Another downside is that it's closely tied to the Overdrive API specifically; it is perhaps possible to modify it to work with other APIs (e.g. OneclickDigital), but that's not as trivial as I'd have liked. It would obviously be great to have the Overdrive API integration available with the next release of Evergreen. Given the aforementioned downsides, though, I assume we don't want to include this in the 2.8 release as-is. On the other hand, it actually works. So I'm not quite sure how to proceed with integrating and supporting this project for the broader Evergreen community. -- Jeff Davis Lead Evergreen Specialist BC Libraries Cooperative
