On 28/03/2008, Paul Bartell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hey. Im going to be presenting a talk about FOSS in libraries, and am > probably going to focus a lot on evergreen. This brings up the > question of what exactly do you think people would be interested in > seeing at such a conference. > > I was thinking of giving an overview of what Evergreen/open-ils is, > and overview the costs of tradidtional ils' and compare those prices > to prices of evergreen support companies. > > The ill go over installation and demo usage of evergreen. > > does anyone have any more ideas of what i should talk about? possibly > how GPLS sort of instigated its creation?
Hey Paul: I wouldn't focus too much on installation - for most people in your audience, it will probably be too technical. Just saying something like "installing Evergreen is more complex than installing Office 2007, but once you've figured it out you can install it in about half an hour - and how often do you install an ILS, anyways?" is probably enough. Talking about the business case for choosing an open source ILS (it's not about the amount of money - that's a red herring, as support costs are often similar to that for a proprietary ILS - it's about the return on that investment), showing off some of the cool things Evergreen can do, and some discussion about who's using or adopting Evergreen will probably be more interesting to the audience. Any of the content from my presentations is available under a Creative Commons license (by attribution, non-commercial, share alike) and might offer good fodder for your presentation. In order of presentation date (newest first): * State of Evergreen acquisitions (and Evergreen for academic institutions) (2008-03-12): http://coffeecode.net/archives/152-Evergreen-Acquisitions-at-VALEs-Next-Generation-Academic-Library-System-Symposium.html * The State of Evergreen (2008-01-28): http://coffeecode.net/archives/149-The-State-of-Evergreen-OLA-Presentation.html * Evergreen business readiness rating (2007-10-12): http://coffeecode.net/archives/142-Laurentian-goes-ever-greener.html * Business case for an open source ILS (2007-04-22): http://coffeecode.net/archives/123-Evergreen-and-the-business-case-for-choosing-an-open-source-ILS.html See also the OPAC walk-through for ideas of cool catalog features to show off: http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=advocacy:evergreen_walk-through_script And if you haven't already, you might want to browse through the blogs at http://open-ils.org/blog , http://coffeecode.net , http://esilibrary.com/blog to pick out some other gems - hmm, am I missing any here? And good luck - if you want to share your slides with us for a review before the presentation for feedback, feel free! -- Dan Scott Laurentian University
