Hello Graham:
Graham Saathoff wrote:
Hello all,
Evergreen seems like a great solution for what I'm trying to do, but I
have a few questions -- hopefully I can get an answer from someone who
understands it better than I do.
We will do our best to answer them ;).
I'm the technical contact/sysadmin for a small housing cooperative
(about 40 members in 4 houses). We're looking to move to a more
robust library management system for our library, which has about
4,000 volumes. Our network and most of our workstations run Linux,
and most users are comfortable with open source software.
I want to create a system that will allow members to check books out
of our central library with a barcode scanner. Since all of our
holdings are owned by individual members, I want a system that can
send an automated email message to the owner of a book when it is
checked out (with information about the patron who has taken the book)
so that it can be retrieved if necessary.
Evergreen does not have built-in capability to automatically e-mail the
owning library upon circulation of their items. The original target
audience of Evergreen was a library consortium circulating tens of
thousands of items a day throughout dozens (or even hundreds) of branch
libraries. The numerous e-mails that would be generated for all these
circulations would be very difficult to deal with. Typically, if a
library wanted to know whom had a particular item, they would simply
check in the staff client.
However, that being said, a solution could easily be made to adapt
Evergreen to do this. Probably the easiest thing is to create a report
that runs nightly and automatically e-mails the result to the library.
Of course, Evergreen is Open-Source under the GPL, which means you can
also add the functionality natively if you so desire.
Search by author/title is also important, but not as critical as the
above requirement. Most members of the coop take a book out of the
library because it interests them, not because they searched for it
(as I said above, we don't have many books availalble)
Searching for items is considered a critical function in Evergreen, and
thus a great deal of time has been put in to it. As an end user, these
searches would usually take place in the Online Public Access Catalog
(or OPAC). I would encourage you to try out the demo OPAC at
http://demo.gapines.org.
Can Evergreen handle this? Any ideas about equipment needed or
estimates of roll-out time would be helpful. I'm very comfortable
with linux and have managed several other networks in the past. Is
there a specific skillset that I need beyond basic networking /
scripting experience that I might need?
With the exception of automatic e-mails upon circulating items,
Evergreen can easily do what you seem to want. To get an idea of the
installation, I would encourage you to check out the community
documentation wiki at http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php.
Thanks,
Graham
Hope this answers most of your questions. If you have any further,
please feel free to e-mail the list again and we will try to help you out!
--Don
Don McMorris Jr.
| Technical Specialist
| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
| phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) x709
| email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| web: http://www.esilibrary.com
