Evergreen 1.4.0.2 Available

The Evergreen developers have just announced that version 1.4.0.2 has been released, along with OpenSRF 1.0.4. From the announcement:

This release adds functionality, configuration, and usability
improvements including, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Improved administrative interfaces for defining organizations and permissions
• Internationalization and localization (Armenian (hy-AM), Canadian French (fr-CA), Canadian English (en-CA), and Czech (cs-CZ))
• Multi-source Z39.50 search for staff
• Pre-overdue (reminder) notices
• SRU/Z39.50 server
• Publication date filtering in advanced search
• Preferred-language setting at both system and organizational level for search results
• Web-based batch record importer/exporter

Happily, this comes just in time for my Reading Week…

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Evergreen 1.4

It has been nearly one month since I came back to school for my final term in the MLIS program. I have purposely front-loaded my schedule so that I can get as many assignments out of the way in the first half.

Because of this, I’ve missed a few things. Notably, the release of Evergreen 1.4 this past week caught me by surprise. But there it is! Congrats to the developers – there are some nifty new features.

Now, back to writing these two papers, preparing for a presentation, and drafting a business plan…

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Last Day at NRCan Library

Today is technically the last day of my co-op placement at the NRCan Library. It has been a fantastic four months and, frankly, I’m not looking forward to heading back for my final MLIS term in January.

Not willing to let the work go just yet, I’ve put in a few longer days this week. I’ve been busy working on “transition” documentation/tutorials; and this morning, I submitted a second iteration of the Evergreen driver for VuFind. Users can now view their hold requests and their fines and the only remaining function to be implemented is placeHold (or, alternatively, the less intrusive getHoldLink).

I want to say a very big Thank You to George Duimovich for “throwing me a life preserver” and giving me the chance to work on open source projects for NRCan.

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Evergreen Driver for VuFind

It has been a while since I started thinking of adding an Evergreen ILS driver to VuFind. After months of neglect, last week I picked up the latest version (1.0-RC1) and continued writing it up.

Currently, holdings info from Evergreen is displayed when viewing records and I’ve added support for ILS authentication. Patrons can log in and see their profile info and a list of the items they have checked out. Still unfinished is the ability for them to place a hold, view their current hold requests, and view a list of their current fines (these will be submitted shortly).

Special thanks to NRCan Library for giving me a bit of time to work on this.

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Evergreen for Canadians

Last week, I submitted a large set of updates for Evergreen’s fr-CA translation. There’s still a few more to do but the bulk of the new strings are now ready (including the new Conify and Vandelay interfaces, which are completely done).

While mucking about with the fr-CA PO files, I also opportunistically went in and did a first pass through the en-CA (English Canadian) translation. So Evergreen will now have the option to display the correct spelling of “catalogue”, “colour”, “cheque”, etc. What a relief, eh?

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The OLE Project Webcast

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” (Sir Barnett Cocks)

The above quote comes close to describing what I was thinking as I watched the OLE Project’s Webcast from November 20th, 2008.

Months of consultations, hundreds of thousand of dollars spent ferrying people here, there, and everywhere…all to produce a design document. That’s a poor ROI. Only after July 2009 will they even begin to think about developing a new ILS, by which time:

1. Evergreen and Koha will have evolved and improved; the OLE Project will still be months away from the rubber meeting the road.
2. Evergreen and/or Koha may very well adopt any ideas the OLE Project outlines in their final “Open Library Management System” document before OLE can get started on actual development work.

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Evergreen 1.4 RC2

Evergreen 1.4, release candidate 2 was released yesterday. Be sure to grab the new 1.0.1 release of OpenSRF when building it.

With this release comes support for internationalization (i18n), so a call for translations has been put out. For those more comfortable with spoken languages than programming languages, this is a great way to contribute to the project.

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Unicorn records now imported into Evergreen

After successfully importing our ~141 000 Innovative bib records into Evergreen two weeks ago, I finally got around to beating our ~300 000 Unicorn bib records into an importable state. They are now in our test Evergreen system. Working without a unique catalogue key and with too many duplicate TCNs (in 001 fields), my temporary solution was to whip up a simple Perl script that takes the MARCXML file and:

1. Generates a unique ID for each record and puts it in a 002 field.
2. Takes that unique ID and appends it to the existing TCN in the 001 field.

Perhaps that’s not the best solution, but at least it gave me the uniqueness that the default Unicorn export couldn’t. The entire process also allowed us a chance to clean up minor problems with a handful of records that had gone unnoticed for a while.

Now it’s onward and upward. I had a chance to sit down with cataloguers from our library and I’ve now got my hands on documentation that explains our libraries’ locations codes. With that information handy, I’m close to getting our the two import_holdings scripts functioning. Good times.

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Inaugural Evergreen Newsletter

The first Evergreen Newsletter has been published. I’m even in the background in one of the pictures!

Meanwhile, I have now successfully imported our ~141 000 Innovative bib records on to our new Evergreen server (currently running a test install of 1.4 release candidate 1). The organization held its AGM last week and I began the import process during lunch on the first day. By mid-afternoon, I was able to gently announce to interested attendees that all of the records were there for them to browse (including some fancy book covers, which were automatically imported). The response was very satisfying.

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Evergreen 1.4RC1

I finally got around to blowing away my 1.2.3.1 Evergreen test installation and instead tracking the SVN trunk build (including OpenSRF trunk). With all that excitement, I missed the announcement that Evergreen 1.4 release candidate 1 is now available. You can download the source tarball here and installation instructions for Ubuntu 8.04 are here.

OpenSRF version 1.0.0 was also released to coincide with the release candidate (available here).

When installing the SVN version of OpenSRF on Ubuntu, I found that doing “sudo apt-get install python-dnspython python-myghtyutils python-pyxmpp python-simplejson” put some dependencies in place before the “configure; make; make install”. While the install scripts are pretty good about going and out and grabbing the source code of deps online and installing them for you, I prefer having proper packages and all the package management goodness that they bring.

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