Date:
Friday, March 26, 2010 - 10:30am - 11:45am
Open Source Works!
Oregon Convention Center C123-124
Panelists:
- Bill Ptacek Director, King County Library System
- Jed Moffitt Director of Information Technology Services, King County Library System
- Matt Carlson Project Coordinator, King County Library System
- Ben Hyman Manager of Library Policy and Technology, Public Library Services of the Ministry of Education
- Amy Terlaga Assistant Director, User Services, Bibliomation, Inc.
- Eli Neiburger Associate Director, IT and Product Development, Ann Arbor District Library
- Lori Bowen Ayre Sr. Consultant and Founder, Galecia Group
In this program, you will hear from public libraries that have put their weight down on the side of open-source systems. Speakers will come from libraries who have committed to migrating to the Evergreen open source ILS. Speakers will talk about their respective paths to open source and share insights and processes that have worked for them. We will de-mystify open-source library systems and show that you can do it if you want to.
Benefits and Learning Objectives
- Participants will learn about the benefits and risks of moving to an open source system and how to effectively hedge their bets.
- Participants will learn specific effective processes that will help them migrate to an open-source system in a stepwise manner.
- Participants will leave with good connections to the growing library open-source community. They'll get to know colleagues that can help them as resources for their own migration.
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PLA Program Highlights
Fantastic OSLS program at PLA.
Lori set the table with a brief rundown of the generations of Evergreen systems. Georgia is now a grandparent, with BC following, and Bibliomation adding their first two Evergreen libraries this month. KCLS to fall later this year.
Ben Hyman of BC is starting to add larger libraries. They inadvertently tipped the system over earlier this month by adding their largest library. Operating system parameters had to be adjusted. There are also some concerns with network errors creating latency. KCLS will be watching BCs performance troubleshooting process closely. They are using the ESI application, "Constrictor", to generate load, and the system monitoring softwrae Nagios, to evaluate performance.
Amy Terlaga talked of the new business opportunities for Bibliomation in Connecticut related to open source. Biblio will keep their Horizon consortium together through 2010 while adding new libraries as development partners on Evergreen. Excellent business plan as it grows Evergreen immediately in small libraries (similar to BC and Georgia) while keeping the larger libraries functioning on their current ILS...all the while, the Biblio staff is gaining OSLS support expertise.
Matt Carlson from KCLS talked about Circulation bug fixing, data migration, Acquisitions development, OPAC development, and a Red Hat version of Linux, all in the context of the needs of a large centralized public library.
Eli Neiburger from Ann Arbor closed with some persuasive and forceful stories of saying "Yes" to staff requests for new services (paging lists on Ipods--how cool is that?) because of the Ann Arbor strategy of putting a middle layer of software in place that allows local resources to develop services that fit local needs in a timely way. That was the main thesis of his presentation. Be good stewards of public money by using it for local public needs. In many ways, Ann Arbor has already transcended the vended ILS model with the work that they are doing, so migrating to an OSLS is not so much a principled choice as a practical choice, and will be based on practical available service.
Big room. Full crowd. Lots of questions in person and on Twitter. The buzz and the movement continues.