Michigan Evergreen to Launch This Summer

The Michigan Library Consortium has selected the open source Evergreen product for their statewide integrated library system, and has also signed with Equinox Software to manage the implementation.

Beginning with a pilot project including three libraries (expected to go live over the summer), Michigan Evergreen will be offered to other consortium libraries later.


Michigan Evergreen is similar to the pioneering Georgia PINES project, a project currently underway in British Columbia, and another statewide project beginning in Indiana.

The award-winning Evergreen software is important in many ways-- it allows libraries to take control of their systems in many new ways, for example. But as a consortial product, it is also driving libraries to the realization that in today's market, shared systems can make an unbeatable business case.

AcqFest to Add Acquisitions and Serials Features to Evergreen

From the open-ils blog comes word of this week's Evergreen AcqFest, during which a group of coders and developers from the U.S. and Canada are meeting in Suwanee, Georgia to work on the acquisitions and serials system (code-named "Woodchip") for the Evergreen open source ILS.

The communal notepad is up as a Google doc and reveals some interesting ideas are floating about. For example, serials control systems have traditionally used calendar-based predictions for serial receiving, which would be adapted as they were used for the inevitable irregularities in subscriptions. Instead, the Woodchip people are looking into a collaborative system in which libraries would share predictive data for titles. Earlier subscribers, which would have worked out many of the quirks in a subscription, would share it with later subscribers, thus easing the workload. A small but smart idea.

Good luck to the Woodchip team. I can't wait to see the outcome!

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King County Will Evaluate Evergreen

Edward Corrado's ecorrado blog brings the story that the giant King County Library System in Washington State (43 branches, 19 million circs in 2006) is hiring Equinox Software to help them evaluate the open source Evergreen ILS.

Evergreen is certainly getting a lot of attention this year even before the serials/acquisition module is out. But the potential advantages of open source in the multi-vendor, multi-system environments in modern libraries are just too obvious to ignore.

Here's the press release: Library Technology Guides: King County Library System selects Equinox Software, Inc. for Evergreen services

Evergreen in the News

Linux.com ran a good summary of the Evergreen project last month-- it was even Slashdotted!

Good to know the word is getting out.