Equinox migrates Oregon County Library District to the Missouri Evergreen Consortium

News Announcement

Duluth, Ga., February 17, 2020: Equinox is pleased to welcome the Oregon County Library District to Evergreen with their successful migration to the Missouri Evergreen Consortium.

The Oregon County Library District’s move will support 2,225 patrons and encompass a total of 51,744 bibliographic records. Services provided by Equinox included project management and Evergreen software configuration. Data extraction and bibliographic deduplication were completed as part of their migration encompassing item, patron, and transaction records. Onsite and virtual training were also provided by Equinox.

“Working with Equinox on Evergreen has been a great experience for the staff of the Oregon County Library District,” said Janice Richardson, Library Coordinator at Oregon County Library District. “We are a small, rural library district with limited resources. Joining the consortium has opened up a whole new world for our patrons with access to materials currently not available at our small branch libraries. The Evergreen training staff at Equinox have been phenomenal, going above and beyond our expectations in terms of training and follow-up questions and concerns. We are looking forward to continued growth and support from the Equinox and Evergreen team as we move forward.”

The Missouri Evergreen Consortium began as a resource sharing initiative in 2012 in an effort to create an integrated library system for libraries in Missouri. They are supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provision of the Library Services and Technology Act as Administered by the Missouri State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.

“The five libraries of the Oregon County Library District (OCLD) recently joined the Missouri Evergreen Consortium of libraries,” said Jennifer Weston, Implementation Project Manager at Equinox. “For the first time, patrons served by these libraries will now have an interactive online library catalog which gives them the ability to access and manage their library accounts as well as search for materials and place holds on items. Equinox is excited and honored to be working with the OCLD libraries and their staff members who have been working diligently to implement this new system to provide new opportunities for their communities.”

About Equinox Open Library Initiative
Equinox Open Library Initiative Inc. is a nonprofit company engaging in literary, charitable, and educational endeavors serving cultural and knowledge institutions.  As the successor to Equinox Software, Inc., the Initiative carries forward a decade of service and experience with Evergreen and other open source library software. At Equinox OLI we help you empower your library with open source technologies.  To learn more, please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/.

About Evergreen

Evergreen is an award-winning ILS developed to provide an open source product able to meet the diverse needs of consortia and high transaction public libraries. However, it has proven to be equally successful in smaller installations including special and academic libraries. Today, over 1500 libraries around the world are using Evergreen including NC Cardinal, SCLENDS, and B.C. Sitka.  For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

Community News – Winter 2020

By Andrea Buntz Neiman, Project Manager for Software Development at Equinox Open Library Initiative

There is so much to look forward to in 2020 but before we get too far into Spring first, a look back at the last couple months of 2019.

October 2019 saw the most recent Evergreen Hack-a-Way, hosted by Indiana State Library for the third time. Nearly 20 Evergreeners gathered together at the Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park Inn to collaborate on Evergreen bugs, strategize about some larger development decisions, and of course socialize and play board games in the evenings. For those of you unable to attend, discussion sessions are available on YouTube. If you’re interested in hosting the Hack-a-Way for 2020, please see this email for more information.

In the Koha community, November saw the latest feature release of Koha with 19.11. The full release notes for 19.11 detail numerous bugfixes and enhancements, as well as 20 new features. One of the most interesting new features adds “Club Holds” functionality. This allows a club to place a hold on a title, and Koha will automatically place holds for all members of that club.

December brought news from the broader library world, with ExLibris signing an agreement to acquire Innovative. While it remains to be seen how this will affect the library software marketplace, it was a reminder to those of us on the open source side of things that Evergreen and Koha can never be bought or sold. Our communities keep Evergreen and Koha alive and vibrant, and make the decisions large and small about the directions of their products. We are grateful to all of you who are members of our communities.

Looking ahead into 2020, there’s plenty to get excited about on the Evergreen and Koha calendars! The Koha Community will have its 2020 Hackfest in Marseille, France the week of March 23rd. The Koha-US Community is also planning a Koha-a-thon online conference on April 23.

The Evergreen Community is scheduled to hold its 2020 Annual Conference from April 22nd through 25th in Atlanta, Georgia, sponsored by Georgia PINES. The Conference Committee is hard at work putting together a great event, and several Equinox employees are planning to attend so we hope to see you there.

Also in the spring, Evergreen is planning its next major release, version 3.5. Bill Erickson of King County Library System and Chris Sharp of Georgia PINES are co-Release Managers (Release co-Managers?) this time around, and 3.5 is scheduled for an April 1st release – no fooling! A Feedback Fest is planned for the week of February 17th, and Bug Squashing Week is planned for the week of March 16th. Both of these are great ways to get involved with the community.

As always, we wish you the best that the New Year has to offer and we look forward to seeing some of you in person this spring!

Recipients of the First Equinox Open Source Grant Announced

News Announcement

Duluth, Ga., February 6, 2020: Upon the completion of the first application cycle of the Equinox Open Source Grant, Equinox Open Library Initiative is honored to announce the first two grantees: Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico, a division of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Spark Central in Spokane, Washington.

The Equinox Open Source Grant program provides hosting and support of Koha, the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The grant was inspired by the vibrant open source community and the belief that every community deserves to benefit from an accessible and thriving library.

“We are excited to give back to the library and open source communities of which we are honored to be a part,” said Mike Rylander, executive director and founder of Equinox. “It has long been our vision to enable sustainability in libraries through the independence and constancy an open source solution can provide. We are thrilled to collaborate with the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and Spark Central.”

The Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico was created in 1967, a division of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. In 2003 it became the National Library to preserve and provide access to resources about and related to Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. Spark Central was founded when Spark Center and INK Art Center joined forces and became one organization in 2016. Their mission is to break down barriers to creativity like cost, confidence, and access.

Over the next three years of the grant cycle the program will provide Koha hosting, training, and access to basic Equinox support. Applicants will be eligible for renewal at the end of the grant cycle. Applications for the 2020 grant cycle will open in the Fall of 2020. Follow Equinox Open Library Initiative on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for the latest updates.

About Equinox Open Library Initiative
Equinox Open Library Initiative Inc. is a 501(c)3 company engaging in literary, charitable, and educational endeavors serving cultural and knowledge institutions.  As the successor to Equinox Software, Inc., the Initiative carries forward a decade of service and experience with Evergreen and other open source library software.  At Equinox OLI we help you empower your library with open source technologies. To learn more, please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/.

About Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
The General Library of Puerto Rico was created in 1967 and was assigned to the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP), the States Arts Agency of Puerto Rico by Dr. Ricardo Alegría. In 2003 it became the National Library with the aim to preserve and provide access to the rich, unique and significant bibliographic productions about and related to Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. The National Library’s mission is centered in the acquisition, preservation and dissemination of publications developed in the country or abroad, by Puerto Ricans or foreign authors on Puerto Rican subjects. To learn more visit https://www.icp.pr.gov/.

About Spark Central
Spark Central is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that ignites the creativity, innovation, and imagination necessary for people to forge the path to their best future. We break down barriers to creativity like cost, confidence, and access by offering transformative programs, access to innovative technology, and a welcoming creative community for people of all economic backgrounds. Everyone deserves the opportunity to forge the future they imagine. As a 501(c)3 charitable organization, we rely on the generosity of people like you to keep our membership and programs available at no cost so income is never a barrier to opportunity. Find out more at spark-central.org.

About Koha
Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual-database design (search engine and RDBMS) built to be compliant with library standards. Koha’s OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are free to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development services.  For more information on Koha, please visit https://koha-community.org.

Hack Your Next Open Source Conference

By Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst at Equinox Open Library Initiative

In the Koha and Evergreen communities the topic of conference attendance invariably pops up when discussing community participation. However, when asked why someone should attend a conference the stock answers are vague and often boilerplate like “to put faces to names.” Conference participation can be extremely rewarding but to get the most out of it you have to take an active role. So, here are five things you can get out of an Evergreen, Koha (or other) conference, plus one tip on how to make it happen for each.

  1. Get feedback. Every library becomes an echo chamber to some degree. Take time before the conference to identify a few improvement opportunities and look for places to ask questions about it. A Q&A session after a presentation on a relevant topic is the perfect time.
  2. Learn. This may seem obvious but not only does a conference lower barriers to transmitting information but there will be people sharing all around you all the time. Create a schedule of presentations you want to attend and prioritize them so that if one doesn’t work out you can leave for another.  If you know a presenter and feel comfortable contacting them you may also be able to reach out to them with questions in advance to make sure it is a good fit for you.
  3. Networking. Not everyone you meet is going to be a future friend but everyone is potentially a useful connection. Carry something with you, a notepad or a smartphone, and make notes about who you meet and what you chatted with them about.  This will help cement the person in your mind and you gain experts you can reach out to in the future.  
  4. Discover the newest work. Keeping track of development can be a big time investment and not one that everyone can make.  A conference is a great opportunity to learn about features and bug fixes recently added or in the pipeline.  To prepare for this make sure you know what version of your ILS you are on and when you are likely to upgrade.  
  5. Share your own ideas and work.  There is an old adage that everyone should teach because you learn more from teaching than being a student. There is a lot of truth to that but also sharing makes you someone else’s contact which can be valuable.  Start by planning something low key like a lightning talk.

None of this is easy. A lot of these benefits take advantage of being in person rather than being limited by electronic communication. This means that if you are an introvert you will expend a lot of energy during the conference day.  Remember to take care of yourself in the evenings and avoid group events if you need time to recharge. And this brings us to a bonus tip. Ultimately conferences are work events. However, if you participate you are likely to make some new friends and in future years it won’t take as much energy and you can get even more out of it.

Koha Tip: Highlights of 19.11

By Felicia Beaudry, Product and Education Specialist, Equinox Open Library Initiative

Koha 19.11 was released in November 2019 and includes exciting new features and enhancements.  The following are just a few highlights of the release:

Cataloging
The Advanced Cataloging Editor has been enhanced to include keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting text to and from a new internal clipboard.  This makes it easier to duplicate fields and subfields. Additionally, access to a virtual keyboard has been added for entering diacritical marks.

Circulation
Koha’s Patron Clubs tool has been available since version 17.05, allowing patrons to be enrolled in clubs managed by the library (e.g., summer reading, book clubs, etc.).  The new Club Holds features allows staff to place a title level hold for club members in batch.  Each member of the club is added to the holds queue for the title in random order.

Claims Returned features have been enhanced. Circulation staff may now mark an item claimed returned directly from the list of checkouts on a patron record, rather than go to the item record.  An alert is now available to notify staff when a patron has more than a defined number of claimed items. The system can be configured to charge a fee automatically to a patron for a claimed item or ask staff whether a fee should be charged.  These enhancements are configured with new system preferences.

A new alert regarding Patron Age notifies staff when a patron’s age is not within the configured age range of the patron category.  An action button allows for changing the patron category directly from the alert dialogue.

Accounting
Koha has long allowed Adult and Organizational patron account types to act as guarantors to Child and Professional types.  Guarantors will now have the option of paying off all charges for their guarantees when making online payments in the public catalog.


For libraries that use Cash Registers, those devices can be added to Koha through Administration and connected to cash payments.  This will provide a new way to track and report on transactions.

Reports
Staff will now have the option to perform Batch Patron Modification directly from the output of a report that lists borrower numbers or library card numbers.  The will significantly streamline the workflow when a report is needed to identify patrons requiring modification.

Administration
Item Types may now be limited to one or more libraries within a Koha instance.  This gives greater flexibility to library systems and consortia that want to allow for individual items types among their libraries.

These are just a few of the many features and enhancements of 19.11.  For more information, see the official Koha 19.11 release notes at https://koha-community.org/koha-19-11-release/.

Consolidation vs Open Source

By Rogan Hamby, Data and Project Analyst at Equinox Open Library Initiative

Acquisitions and consolidations are nothing new in the library world. Still, each one triggers a wave of shock and Marshall Breeding gets a chance to update his very illuminating graphic showing mergers and acquisitions: https://librarytechnology.org/mergers/. There are always promises of long term benefits to the customer when their ILS is acquired. However, the only thing the customer is sure to get are press releases and uncertainty.

The cause of uncertainty is simple – the future of your ILS is in doubt. Unless the two products are for very different parts of the market, the acquiring vendor is likely to phase out one as redundant. It may be gradual and gentle and may not start for years but it will happen so long as as developing and supporting different products is an additional cost rather than additional revenue.

For libraries that value stability and don’t want to be subject to the whims of the market, open source ILSes, especially Evergreen and Koha, are bedrocks of constance. Open source is a collection of licenses that say the code is freely available to use and expand upon. You can use that granted right without expiration, use the software forever, no uncertainty, no loopholes. Still, who guarantees the future? Times change and ILSs have to adapt. A stable ILS is one that will be supported for the foreseeable future.  You should be able to adopt an ILS and expect to get ten years out of it. So, who does the development, who pushes forward, who in essence takes the place of an ILS corporation? Again, here open source wins because the answer is easy: the community.

A community is a broad idea but that breadth is a part of a healthy open source community. In a recent informal poll the Evergreen community reported adding 64 new libraries in 2019.  Stability is also reflected in the investment those libraries make. For example, look at the release notes for Koha and Evergreen as each gets several new versions every year – each with substantial community investment from user libraries. Looking at a recent release of Evergreen alone the release  had contributions from 32 coders and documentation writers. Seven institutions funded development and fourteen contributed the time of employees resulting in 36 new features. These releases are twice a year plus monthly bug fixes. That’s a heck of a lot of development team with a breadth of input, testing and documentation.

There is another element of course – support. Most ILS vendors offer support as well as the software itself. Access to open source software is not controlled but companies do offer hosting and support. It is possible for a hosting or service company to merge but even then your ILS can’t go away. Simply put, you can change to another service provider – use uninterrupted.

In sum, open source offers more security and options to allow continuity of service putting control in the hands of the library though inalienable privileges. Increasingly  our society libraries are a safety net. Safety nets should be steady and unmoving and they can not do that if they are held captive by the business whims of others.