The Evergreen Community

The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by approximately 800 libraries.  The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition of library materials, and (particularly in the case of Evergreen) sharing resources among groups of libraries.

The Evergreen Project was initiated by the Georgia Public Library System in 2006 to serve their need for a scalable catalog shared by (as of now) approximately 250 public libraries in the state of Georgia.  After Evergreen was released, it has since been adopted by a number of library consortia in the US and Canada as well as various individual libraries, and has started being adopted by libraries outside of North America.

The Evergreen development community is relatively small, with about nine active committers and roughly 50 individuals who have contributed patches (as of March 10th, 2011).  However, the Evergreen community is also marked by a high degree of participation by the librarians who use the software and contribute documentation, bug reports, and organizational energy.  As such, Evergreen is very much about both the developers *and* the users.

Because of the nature of ILSs, Evergreen has an interesting mixture of functionality. For example:

• * Evergreen is a metadata search engine
• * Evergreen is a transaction processing engine
• * Evergreen is just another web application
• * Evergreen is based on a robust, scalable, message-passing framework - OpenSRF

Getting to know Evergreen

To learn more about Evergreen:

• Start with the Frequently Asked Questions and the Evergreen Roadmap
• Browse the public demos of Evergreen's online catalog.
• Visit live implementations of Evergreen in libraries large and small, public and academic
• Explore developer versions of the Evergreen catalog. These exhibit all the latest & greatest features we're working on currently.
  Note: The development site may be unstable, experimental, missing data, etc.

• Download and install the staff client, the server, or a VMWare image of the server

Getting Involved with Evergreen's Communities

• Say hi on our Facebook page
• Subscribe to the Evergreen mailing lists and introduce yourself once you're on board
• Or if you're shy, send an email to a few community volunteers at feedback@evergreen-ils.org
• Stop by our Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at #Evergreen on the Freenode IRC network.
  Note: Most but not all activity is on and off daytime through evening, EST.
• Browse the Evergreen blog and comment on the posts