Hi everyone my name is Repke de Vries from Amsterdam and my two reasons to join and contribute are:
- a project (attached to the team as freelancer) at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam [1] that selects a FOSS ILS package to replace IISH's Advance ILS from Geac / Infor; we wrote up requirements, did a short feasibility study if there would be any likely FOSS ILS packages, wrote up test plan + test scenarios and just concluded tests with the number one candidate from the feasibility phase - which wasn't Evergreen and we urgently await Evergreen's 1.6 as a possible better package given our needs Both the feasibility study and presently looking at Evergreen 1.4 (while waiting for :-)) is severely hindered by lack of adequate documentation. I agree strongly with Paul's observations in this respect. - some of you who were at the Evergreen conference (I wasn't) may have attended Tigran Zargaryan's presentation where Tigran also gave background information on eIFL and the eIFL FOSS program [2] ; well: that is one of my hats too - partly involved with Tigran's eIFL FOSS ILS project but my main involvement is with the "eIFL FOSS SA (southern Africa) Greenstone Support Network" project. My eIFL work learns me a lot about internationalisation (I prefer UK english spelling this word - here you go, even in english) and the very different documentation types needed for training (including installation and set up), support and advocacy - the latter explaining FOSS library software to higher management. Also doing my own Greenstone implementation work and like their approach to documentation very much [3]. That said: an offline doc format is much better in situations with poor Internet connectivity - as long as reader software for such formats is FOSS. How I would like to contribute: any dirty work is fine, certainly trying out draft documentation in practice (see above), less so the actual writing (though my technical writing skills are better than all my other prose which tends to go all over the place) Yours, Repke web: http://www.linkedin.com/in/repke P.S.: my second name Eduard might give a further clue to the he / she question (talking about ambiguous documentation) [1] http://www.iisg.nl [2] http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-foss [3] http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/GreenstoneWiki Op 8-jun-2009, om 2:23 heeft Paul J. Weiss het volgende geschreven: > Karen and I were thinking that with the renewed interest and energy > on documentation, it might be a good idea to have us list > subscribers introduce ourselves to each other. I would be > particularly be interested to know what your interest/need in > Evergreen documentation is, how you might like to get involved (or > not), and any experience you have with documentation that might be > relevant. > > I _______________________________________________ OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION mailing list [email protected] http://list.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-documentation
