Come join your friends in the Evergreen community at next month’s PLA conference in Portland!  We’re planning to meet up at Deschutes Brewery for beer and conversation on Thursday, March 25th, at 5:30pm. 

Here’s some more info on Deschutes: 

Congratulations to Amy Terlaga and Bibliomation for finding 3 co-development partners for an initiative to develop a Kids catalog on Evergreen.  It looks like Sitka, PINES, and KCLS have all hopped aboard.  Luck to us all, and hope we get a good product from it, but regardless, this is a great story and a first example of the potential of co-development partnering via the Evergreen Community.

We've had questions recently about our development plans for Evergreen OPAC.  We're attaching our project plan for OPAC development and implementation here in this post.  This document shows a high level schedule and milestones for this project.  Can you say "tight timeframe"?

Hats off to the KCLS Web Services Department including Lisa Hill, Melissa Falgout, and Josh Ring, who are orchestrating this complex project. 

I met my new neighbor last week.  An open welcome here to Rob Zangara who has recently come aboard as the chief technology officer for the Seattle Public Library.  Rob Comes to the West Coast from the New Jersey State library and he brings alot of experience in networking and technology infrastructure.  A friend across Lake Washington with this kind of experience is welcome news to me as I could use some good advice and collaboration toward development of a longer-term vision for the network at KCLS.

While Rob was interested in Evergreen and open-source, it wasn't necessarily at the top of his list.  Like all of us, he faces a lava field of immediate technology priorities.  High on Rob's queue was the need for attention to functional problems with the PC Reservation system.

Anyone familiar with my previous writing and thinking about RFID may find this post ironic, if not contradictory.  I'm hoping rather that it simply reflects keeping an open mind about the evolution of technology, and the value and energy that can be created by public libraries working together to create great new services through newfound control of their information systems.

In summary, this post is an open-letter of support for a grant proposal led by the Grand Rapids Public Library.  The proposal is for the development of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sub-system and standard for interoperability with the Evergreen system.

The potential benefits for public libraries include better patron service and staff efficiency for material handling, self-checkout, and possibly a few security options to try to discourage disappearance of popular media materials.

Cutting right to the chase, the possible benefit that I'm really jazzed about for KCLS is the ability of this concept to make it so that our backroom staff don't have to open every single DVD or CD that returns to the library to verify that:

a) the disk is actually in the container and

b) that multiple disk sets actually have all the disks included

In "Makers", Kodak and Duracell are merging to form the conglomerate, "Kodacell".  The new company has wads of cash, but no products that anyone wants to buy anymore.  Sound familiar?

So an Eminent blogger, Suzanne Church, is hired by the CEO of Kodacell to move from Silicon Valley to the burned-out, bankrupted suburban strip-mall  wastelands of Florida and write about the new engineering exploits of two guys who specialize in scavenging the circuitry from piles of unsold Boogie-Woogie Elmo dolls and constructing innovative but useless technological inventions that sell well for a time, and have not yet been copied and undercut by overseas sweatshops.

To the CEO, Kodacell's future is innovation.  Recognizing that every product they create will have it's margins fully undercut by global competition within 6 months, the strategy for the company is innovation for innovation's sake.  Don't stick with an idea too long.  Come up with a new one before the old one is completely subsumed by more efficient world-wide copycat operations.

This theme should strike a warm chord in the restless heart of the library open source community.

Well--its time again for the major holiday that immediately follows New Years Day:  The first day of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.  This year Steve Ballmer has center stage showing a new slate computer from Microsoft that appears to be making it to market just ahead of a similar slate computer that we all know is coming from Apple.  Note what Ballmer says about the new device--among other things:  "Its perfect for Reading..."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2010725499_ces07.html?pr...

I wanted to share this nice development over at Marshall Breeding's Library Technology Guides site.  He's working on an API that dynamically creates a map using data from his lib-web-cats application so now we can see just how pervasive Evergreen is (based on lib-web-cats anyway).