Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] State of the map of Evergreen libraries?
I'm strongly in favor of this and have similar ulterior motives as this kind of visualization is a powerful tool. Quoting Dan Scott d...@coffeecode.net: Hi: During Ben Hyman's opening bit on international libraries, he mentioned that he had started trying to resurrect the map of Evergreen libraries that Bob Molyneux had originally created. I know that several people have obtained copies of Bob's KML file; I'm wondering if it makes sense to try and organize a collaborative effort on keeping the data up to date? (I'll admit that I have an ulterior motive of wanting to point at a map with such data during an upcoming presentation at PGCon 2012 - and while there's Mr. Breeding's effort, I have a strong bias towards community-maintained data...) Dan -- Rogan Hamby Manager Rock Hill Library Reference Services York County Library System Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] State of the map of Evergreen libraries?
Hi, On May 5, 2012, at 5:40 PM, Dan Scott wrote: I know that several people have obtained copies of Bob's KML file; I'm wondering if it makes sense to try and organize a collaborative effort on keeping the data up to date? This is a good idea. In the very short term, would anybody who has a copy of the KML file be willing to (say) upload it to the wiki? Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Director of Support and Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: g...@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web:http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org http://evergreen-ils.org
Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Fwd: Acquisitions issues (Sitka)
Hi again Sharon, I've begun opening new bugs for those items on your list that didn't already have them, including some comments for the developer community on how these problems can be addressed from a technical perspective. The following numbered items from your PDF now have the following associated Launchpad bugs. Feel free to comment on those or to link in other bugs or other documents if you know any other places where the same issues have been discussed. 3. http://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996016 6. http://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996020 7. http://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996026 8. http://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996029 10. http://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996033 Additionally, regarding your number 9, sites can customize the line item worksheet. The template is defined in an Action Trigger Event Definition with the name 'Lineitem Worksheet', and changing it to work on narrow-format printers should just be a matter of HTML and/or CSS. I will add more commentary on other items on your list as I am able, and I hope that this begins to spur a two-way conversation between Acq uses and the developer community. Thanks! Lebbeous On Tue, 01 May 2012 11:53:57 -0400, Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley lebbe...@esilibrary.com wrote: Hi Sharon, Thanks for bringing this discussion to the mailing list. Regarding the items on your top ten list, I will offer my input on how development can address these issues in the related LaunchPad bug for each one (or create a new bug where there isn't already one for an issue) over the next little while. Of your two biggest issues, the slow response time is pretty self explanatory, but as to the workflow, I would recommend that the discussion continue right here on the mailing list about what exactly must change about the workflow, to the extent that those changes are not already covered in your top ten list. My thanks to you, to Jennifer Pringle, Megan Maurer, Tara Robertson, and to everyone else helping to communicate the needs of Acq folks in general to the development community. Lebbeous On 04/30/2012 06:45 PM, Sharon Herbert (Project Sitka) wrote: And here's the attachment with our Top 10 list - Forwarded message from sherb...@sitka.bclibraries.ca - Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:44:29 -0700 From: Sharon Herbert (Project Sitka) sherb...@sitka.bclibraries.ca Reply-To: Sharon Herbert (Project Sitka) sherb...@sitka.bclibraries.ca Subject: Acquisitions issues (Sitka) To: open-ils-general@list.georgialibraries.org Thanks Kathy for keeping the great conversation from the conference going on the list. I hope that the developers won't regret asking us to make some noise ;) I'm hoping that we can find some areas of consensus with all of our top issues lists. I've attached Sitka's top 10 development/bug fix requests, which was compiled by Jennifer Pringle, our Acquisitions lead for Sitka support; I shared our top 5 at Megan Maurer's Acquisitions session on Friday. Our development list is based on the experience of running Acquisitions live on production for 6 sites, including a large 15-branch system that has been using EG Acquisitions since September. I've included the Launchpad numbers for the top 5. As Tara Robertson has already explained, our biggest issues in using Acquisitions on production are the workflow and very slow response time around purchase order handling. These two issues are inextricably linked: 1.Ability to Batch Link Line Items to Invoices – LP #985308 Scenario: -Library receives a shipments of items from a provider that does not use EDI. The invoice for this shipment contains 4 items from purchase order A, 3 items from purchase order B, 12 items from purchase order C, 7 items from purchase order D and 2 items from purchase order E. Each of these purchase orders also contain line items still waiting to be shipped that will appear on a different invoice. -To create an invoice for these items the user must individually link each of the 28 line items from their purchase orders to this invoice. Solution: Have a function that allows a user select a number of line items on a purchase order using the tick box and then batch link the items to an invoice through the main Actions menu. Similar functionality currently exists for deleting line items, updating funds on line items, and cancelling line items. 2. Purchase Order and Invoice slowness – LP #985295 Large purchase orders are consistently slow to open. A very large purchase order of 382 line items (a hotlist from a vendor) takes over 4 minutes to load. During that time the staff client stops responding and no tasks can be performed in Evergreen until the purchase order has fully loaded. This is particularly a problem when users are linking line items from a purchase order to an invoice. Line items are linked individually from a purchase order to an invoice and the invoice opens in
[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 2.2 RC1 real soon now - first last call
Hi everyone, [With apologies for the developery tone of this prose] As 2.2 release maintainer, I want to get 2.2 RC1 cut and officialized by Monday, May 14. At Dan Scott's suggestion, this is the first of two last calls for showstopping bugs or other blocking issues. Speak now. This is the pre-tarball last call. Input from folks on bugs and blockers comes from their experience with the rel_2_2 branch (or alpha tarballs). Around midweek we'll actually produce an rc1 tarball, and the second, or post-tarball last call should based on bugs and blockers witnessed from actually running the code in the tarball. These are on currently on my radar, to make sure they get addressed before I ask Thomas to cut the 2.2 rc1 tarball. https://launchpad.net/bugs/758982 https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/960369 https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/996024 https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/986196 At this stage we really need to get the 2.2 release process accelerated so sites can get access to new features, so I would point out that we're no longer talking about moderate bugs that can always be fixed in a point release, complex bugs that we don't have a solution for yet, or wishlist items. But we do need to avoid shipping a release with major features broken out of the box, and that's the kind of showstopper or blocking bug that I'm asking for reports on. Thanks! -- Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley | Software Developer | Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source | phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457) | email: lebbe...@esilibrary.com | web: http://www.esilibrary.com
Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Improving relevance ranking in Evergreen
Hi Mike, FWIW, there is a library testing some new combinations of CD modifiers and having some success. As soon as I know more I will share (if they don't first). Did anything ever come of this? I would be interested in seeing any examples that resulted in improved relevancy. The fairly mechanical change from GIST to GIN indexing is definitely a small-effort thing. I think the other ideas listed here (and still others from the past, like direct MARC indexing, and use of tsearch weighting classes) are probably worth trying -- particularly the relevance-adjustment-functions-in-C idea -- as GSoC projects, but may turn out to be too big. It's worth listing them as ideas for candidates to propose, though. I was happy to see that Optimize Evergreen: Convert PL/Perl-based PostgreSQL stored procedures to PL/SQL or PL/C was one of the accepted GSoC projects. However, since I got a little lost in the technical details of this discussion, I was curious if, when this GSoC project is complete, we can can feel more comfortable about using search.relevance_ranking to tweak the relevancy without adversely affecting search performance. I know there were two related GSoC ideas listed, and I wasn't sure if both needed to be done together to ultimately improve search speeds. Thanks! Kathy -- Kathy Lussier Project Coordinator Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative (508) 756-0172 (508) 755-3721 (fax) kluss...@masslnc.org Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier On 3/6/2012 5:00 PM, Mike Rylander wrote: On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Kathy Lussierkluss...@masslnc.org wrote: Hi all, I mentioned this during an e-mail discussion on the list last month, but I just wanted to hear from others in the Evergreen community about whether there is a desire to improve the relevance ranking for search results in Evergreen. Currently, we can tweak relevancy in the opensrf.xml, and it can look at things like the document length, word proximity, and unique word count. We've found that we had to remove the modifiers for document length and unique word count to prevent a problem where brief bib records were ranked way too high in our search results. FWIW, there is a library testing some new combinations of CD modifiers and having some success. As soon as I know more I will share (if they don't first). In our local discussions, we've thought the following enhancements could improve the ranking of search results: * Giving greater weight to a record if the search terms appear in the title or subject (ideally, we would like these field to be configurable.) This is something that is tweakable in search.relevance_ranking, but my understanding is that the use of these tweaks results in a major reduction in search performance. Indeed they do, however rewriting them in C to be super-fast would improve this situation. It's primarily a matter of available time and effort. It's also, however, pretty specialized work as you're dealing with Postgres at a very intimate level. * Using some type of popularity metric to boost relevancy for popular titles. I'm not sure what this metric should be (number of copies attached to record? Total circs in last x months? Total current circs?), but we believe some type of popularity measure would be particularly helpful in a public library where searches will often be for titles that are popular. For example, a search for twilight will most likely be for the Stephanie Meyers novel and not this http://books.google.com/books/about/Twilight.html?id=zEhkpXCyGzIC. Mike Rylander had indicated in a previous e-mail (http://markmail.org/message/h6u5r3sy4nr36wsl) that we might be able to handle this through an overnight cron job without a negative impact on search speeds. Right ... A regular stats-gathering job could certainly allow this, and (if the QuqeryParser explain branch gets merged to master so we have a standard search canonicalization function) logged query analysis is another option as well. Do others think these two enhancements would improve the search results in Evergreen? Do you think there are other things we could do to improve relevancy? My main concern would be that any changes might slow down search speeds, and I would want to make sure that we could do something to retrieve better search results without a slowdown. I would prefer better results with a speed /increase/! :) But, who wouldn't. I can offer at least one lower-hanging fruit idea: switch from GIST indexes to GIN indexes by default, as they're much faster these days. Also, I was wondering if this type of project might be a good candidate for a Google Summer of Code project. The fairly mechanical change from GIST to GIN indexing is definitely a small-effort thing. I think the other ideas listed here (and still others from the past, like direct MARC indexing, and use of tsearch weighting classes) are probably worth trying -- particularly the relevance-adjustment-functions-in-C idea --
[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: Should we have a systems administrators list?
If by siloing you mean that parts of the community with interest in a specialized topic (which may or may not be of immediate interest to the rest of the community) can discuss issues on that topic using a mailing list dedicated to that topic, I'm not bother by it ;) It's not like we are talking about a password-protected invitation-only secret list with no public logging. I did not get the sense that the community is currently siloed in any way, even though I can count at least 10 mailing lists currently in existence. I subscribed to the ones of interest to me. Having separate lists allows me to automatically filter the incoming messages and pay more attention to the topics of more immediate interest. Considering 100s of emails I get per day, that is actually very helpful. Alexey Lazar PALS Information System Developer and Integrator 507-389-2907 http://www.mnpals.org/ On May 4, 2012, at 16:15 , Lori Bowen Ayre wrote: I'd like to see the SysAdmin stuff live on the General List because that is the one list that we encourage everyone to participate in. On the page that describes our mailing lists (http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php), the Dev list is listed a the Technical Discussion Mailing List but then it is described (as Yamil notes) as a place for patches and technical discussions about Evergreen and OpenSRF development which suggests it is really more about development than all things technical. In addition, the name of the list (once you've joined) is Evergreen Development Discussion List. If we were to move forward with having SysAdmin stuff on the General List, I would suggest changing the descriptions to something like this: A) Evergreen General Discussion List This is the primary list for the Evergreen community -- Evergreen users, Evergreen Sys Admins, Developers, librarians, library workers, fellow travelers, or people just plain curious about Evergreen are encouraged to subscribe. Traffic on this list is moderate to heavy. Posts range from discussions about possible new features to questions about implementation and configuration. There is no such thing as a dumb question or comment for the Evergreen general list. If you're thinking the question, chances are, you're in good company. Ask, and you give other members of the Evergreen community an opportunity to share their growing knowledge. Because it is a list used by so many different groups of people, please use the SUBJECT field to clearly identify the topic so that the right people are sure to read your post. B) Evergreen Development Discussion List This list is for developers or for people who wish to communicate with developers about patches, features, bugs, and enhancement. The list is for very technical discussions about Evergreen and OpenSRF development. Messages and responses are often in the shorthand common to this culture. Traffic on this list is light. On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 1:55 PM, Yamil Suarez ysua...@berklee.edu wrote: Hello everyone, I just wanted to finally weigh in on this topic. For now I am partially siding with Ben Shum in that we do not create a new list because silo'ing concerns, but I always though that it was never clear if I should use the dev or the general lists for my sysadmin questions. For example, see below for how the two lists are currently described on the site http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php --- A) Evergreen General Discussion List This is the general-topic, (usually) non-technical list for the Evergreen community -- Evergreen users, librarians, library workers, library users, developers, fellow travelers, or people just plain curious about Evergreen. As of October, 2008, this list had over 500 members. Its traffic is moderate. General means general. Posts range from discussions about possible new features to quick questions about implementation. There is no such thing as a dumb question or comment for the Evergreen general list. If you're thinking the question, chances are, you're in good company. Ask, and you give other members of the Evergreen community an opportunity to share their growing knowledge. B) Evergreen Technical Discussion List This list is for patches and technical discussions about Evergreen and OpenSRF development. Messages and responses are often in the shorthand common to this culture. So which ever way we go with this, I think we should make small updates to the description of which ever lists that we end up with to make it more clear where sysadmin questions should be send to. Finally, thanks to Chris for setting up a meeting to talk about this. Yamil On May 1, 2012, at 12:14 PM, Ben Shum wrote: I'm -1 to this proposal. For many years, I've mused with other Evergreen system administrators on the issues facing our particular role and areas for
[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Web Team Meeting
Greetings All, I'd like to call a meeting of the Web Team for this Wednesday, May 10th, at 2pm EST. To participate, use this conference call number: 866 365 4406 / 3693433# So far, I have the following people planning to attend: Galen, Kate, Lori, Amy, and June I'm hoping we will also see Jim Craner, Stephen Wills, and Alexey. And anyone who would like to get involved in all things Web/Communications is invited. Here's some potential agenda items (in no particular order): 1. Conference update 2. Newsletter is reborn and what that means 3. Moving forward with a website proof-of-concept using Drupal 4. Discussion of Discussion Forums 5. Archiving conference stuff 6. Interest Groups versus Task Forces (do we have recommendations related to these?) 7. Update the Communication Guidelines and get them set up to auto-send Further discussions will take place on the Web Team list but we will provide an update of what happened at this meeting on the General List. If you'd like to participate in Web Team discussions, here's the place to join that list: http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-web-team. Lori =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lori Bowen Ayre // Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group Oversight Board Communications Committee / Evergreen (707) 763-6869 // lori.a...@galecia.com Availability: http://tungle.me/lori.ayre lori.a...@galecia.comSpecializing in open source ILS solutions, RFID, filtering, workflow optimization, and materials handling =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: Web Team Meeting
As luck would have it, I am attending a Drupal seminar with discussion period that overlaps this time. I can try and attend the tail end if that is of any help. Alternately, can we push it back an hour to 3 EST? Sorry to be a pain, Steve Wills -Original Message- From: Lori Bowen Ayre [mailto:lori.a...@galecia.com] Sent: Monday, May 7, 2012 04:40 PM To: 'Evergreen Discussion Group', 'Evergreen Community Web Team Email List' Cc: 'Jim Craner', 'Stephen Wills', 'Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich' Subject: Web Team Meeting Greetings All, I'd like to call a meeting of the Web Team for this Wednesday, May 10th, at 2pm EST. To participate, use this conference call number: 866 365 4406 / 3693433# So far, I have the following people planning to attend: Galen, Kate, Lori, Amy, and June I'm hoping we will also see Jim Craner, Stephen Wills, and Alexey. And anyone who would like to get involved in all things Web/Communications is invited. Here's some potential agenda items (in no particular order): 1. Conference update 2. Newsletter is reborn and what that means 3. Moving forward with a website proof-of-concept using Drupal 4. Discussion of Discussion Forums 5. Archiving conference stuff 6. Interest Groups versus Task Forces (do we have recommendations related to these?) 7. Update the Communication Guidelines and get them set up to auto-send Further discussions will take place on the Web Team list but we will provide an update of what happened at this meeting on the General List. If you'd like to participate in Web Team discussions, here's the place to join that list: http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-web-team. Lori =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lori Bowen Ayre // Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group Oversight Board Communications Committee / Evergreen (707) 763-6869 // lori.a...@galecia.com Availability: http://tungle.me/lori.ayre Specializing in open source ILS solutions, RFID, filtering, workflow optimization, and materials handling =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** Re: Should we have a systems administrators list?
On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 3:15 PM, Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich alexey.la...@mnsu.edu wrote: If by siloing you mean that parts of the community with interest in a specialized topic (which may or may not be of immediate interest to the rest of the community) can discuss issues on that topic using a mailing list dedicated to that topic, I'm not bother by it ;) It's not like we are talking about a password-protected invitation-only secret list with no public logging. I did not get the sense that the community is currently siloed in any way, even though I can count at least 10 mailing lists currently in existence. I subscribed to the ones of interest to me. Having separate lists allows me to automatically filter the incoming messages and pay more attention to the topics of more immediate interest. Considering 100s of emails I get per day, that is actually very helpful. What I am referring to is that if in the future we have a separate sysadmin list, those that don't sign up to both the sysadmin and dev list might miss out on some relevant information and discussions on the dev list or vice versa. I don't think it is a bad thing to have a scenario that find us wanting to recommend to someone that they should sign up to two lists instead of one, but I would feel bad for those that were not aware of both lists when they would benefit from them. Right now I am sure many out there already recommend to sysadmins to at least subscribe to both the dev and general lists at a minimum, and perhaps we will add a third list (sysadmin) in the future. Though of course I don't think adding this third list is an insurmountable challenge. I hope what I meant make more sense now, not that it makes it more preferable. Yamil
Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Web Team Meeting
Alexey, Thanks for straightening that out! Something didn't seem right but about that Wednesday time slot! It would be THURSDAY, May 10th at 2pm EST. Call in number: 866 365 4406 / 3693433# Maybe that means Stephen can attend afterall! Lori On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich alexey.la...@mnsu.edu wrote: Hello, Lori. Just to clarify, is the meeting on Wednesday May 9th, or Thursday May 10th? Alexey Lazar PALS Information System Developer and Integrator 507-389-2907 http://www.mnpals.org/ On May 7, 2012, at 15:40 , Lori Bowen Ayre wrote: Greetings All, I'd like to call a meeting of the Web Team for this Wednesday, May 10th, at 2pm EST. To participate, use this conference call number: 866 365 4406 / 3693433# So far, I have the following people planning to attend: Galen, Kate, Lori, Amy, and June I'm hoping we will also see Jim Craner, Stephen Wills, and Alexey. And anyone who would like to get involved in all things Web/Communications is invited. Here's some potential agenda items (in no particular order): 1. Conference update 2. Newsletter is reborn and what that means 3. Moving forward with a website proof-of-concept using Drupal 4. Discussion of Discussion Forums 5. Archiving conference stuff 6. Interest Groups versus Task Forces (do we have recommendations related to these?) 7. Update the Communication Guidelines and get them set up to auto-send Further discussions will take place on the Web Team list but we will provide an update of what happened at this meeting on the General List. If you'd like to participate in Web Team discussions, here's the place to join that list: http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-web-team. Lori =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lori Bowen Ayre // Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group Oversight Board Communications Committee / Evergreen (707) 763-6869 // lori.a...@galecia.com Availability: http://tungle.me/lori.ayre Specializing in open source ILS solutions, RFID, filtering, workflow optimization, and materials handling =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] May 2012 Evergreen Newsletter: Conference Edition
Hello, friends - here is our May Evergreen Newsletter: Conference Edition Amy May 2012 Evergreen Newsletter: Conference Edition Two-hundred-and-seventy-one members of the Evergreen community convened in Indianapolis during the last week of April for our fourth annual Evergreen International Conference. This was a sizable increase from last year's number of 180 attendees. Our community continues to grow up and out, with representatives from Mexico, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, Wales, and the U.S. in attendance. Jim Corridan, Shauna Borger and their crew from the Indiana State Library kept us all busy, informed, and entertained during the four days of the conference. Here are some of the highlights: Hackfest / Interest Group Day (Wednesday) The Wednesday Developer Hackfest proved to be very fruitful. A number of projects were tackled including making Syndetics content appear in TPAC and a Mexican-Spanish translation of the catalog. Dan Scott showed the others how to sign off on patch contributions, too. The Documentation Interest Group (DIG) meeting was led by Yamil Suarez of Berkeley College of Music in Boston. DIG is looking for proof-readers to review the documentation that has been approved for the website. If interested, you can email documentat...@evergreen-ils.org. IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Reports Interest Group, by Jenny Turner, PALS Over 30 individuals interested in reports in Evergreen met ; attendees were from a variety of libraries with various experience using Evergreen's reports interface. Meeting attendees broke into groups according to interest. Jenny Turner (PALS) convened a QA session for Evergreen Reports newbies and investigators. Jessica Venturo (Bibliomation) lead a group that discussed staff client report ideas, new features in 2.2, and brainstormed items to add to the Taskforce's wish lists http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-reports:taskforce_wish_l ists . Amy Terlaga (Bibliomation) met with current and interested SQL reporters to share ideas on how this form of reporting may be used. Following the small group meetings, Darrell Rodgers of Emerald Data Systems shared wireframes of development his company intends to do for GPLS to create a user-friendly interface for management-level reporting. These wireframes are now available on the Evergreen website: http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-reports:reports_wire frames. Notes from the Reports Interest Group's meeting will be made available on the Reports Taskforce's website in the near future. Watch the Evergreen General http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/mailman/listinfo/open-ils-general and Reports http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-reports mailing lists for news about our upcoming meeting - all are welcome! Interested in learning more about our work? Contact Jenny Turner at repo...@evergreen-ils.org. Conference Opening Remarks: The State of Evergreen (Thursday) IN THE SPOTLIGHT: The State of Evergreen, by Tara Robertson, Systems and Technical Services Librarian, Emily Carr University of Art + Design I was asked to participate in The State of Evergreen because of the unsung heroes project. I loved the series of blog posts that Chris Cormack has been doing to highlight Koha community members and adapted his idea for the Evergreen community. I learned two things. First, people were reluctant to promote themselves and write bios listing all their accomplishments. I shouldn't have been surprised by this. It was more effective to ask someone's coworker, colleague or boss to highlight their contributions. I like that our community values humility, but know that most people enjoy being recognized for work that they are proud of. Second, some people felt that the work that they did was insignificant and not worthy of being recognized. Almost all of these people were women who had been nominated by other people in the community. After an email or two all of these people agreed to be profiled. I want to help foster a culture where we recognize and value all sorts of contributions that are key to making the community strong, sustainable and an enjoyable place to be. What do you want this community to look like? Why do you put your time and energy into making Evergreen better? User Programs (Thursday and Friday) The user programs were varied, covering a wide range of topics - everything from Evergreen Basics for newbies to the nitty gritty of circulation rules settings with Down the Rabbit Hole: In-Database Approach For Circulation/Hold Policy Configuration. Tony Bandy of OHIONET had this to say about the Template Toolkit OPAC Customizations: Nuts and Bolts program on Friday: Learning about the Template Toolkit OPAC and all of the coming options for our consortium, (COOL, http://www.cool-cat.org), I'm excited about the many changes on the way. IN THE SPOTLIGHT: PROGRAM - Resource Sharing in Evergreen Grace
