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The Santa Cruz Library System in California announced they have selected the open source Koha Zoom integrated library system to replace their aging DRA Web 2 ILS. Working with Koha support vendor LibLime, the SCPL expects their new system to go live in the Fall of 2008.
The SCPL has a central library and nine branches, with an annual circulation of about 2 million items.
Hundreds of other libraries will face the choice of how to replace their aging, dead-ended proprietary ILSs over the next few years, and congrats to the SCPL for choosing an open source solution!
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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Earlier today, Andrew Nagy on Code4Lib announced Villanova University's new open source discovery tool VuFind is available as beta software (officially release 0.5). Half the blogs and listservs I follow seem to have echoed this announcement by now, so I thought I'd join the crowd.
Checkout the Live Demo to see how well they've incorporated the long list of features librarians are looking for in "2.0" discovery tools, including patron tagging, user comments, links to reviews, and faceted browsing. But it also has (or soon will have) the back-end features it will need to function in the library computing ecosystem: it supports LDAP and database authentication, retrieves holdings status from the local ILS (currently with Endeavor Voyager), with support for other ILSs on the way (SirsiDynix, Evergreen, Koha, and "more to come"). Other features on the way include a script for a nightly data sync with the ILS, and holds and recall features.
It looks to be a very well-designed, feature-rich Solr-based product, and congrats to the team that created it!
VuFind is just one of several such projects (although a sharp-looking one) coming from libraries today. The pace of these projects seems to be picking up, the feature lists are being refined, and the technical issues ironed out. It will be interesting to see how the slower-moving proprietary vendors compete!
