John M., who knows his stuff from both sides of the coin, having been an IBM web developer before beginning library school, has written a post entitled “Eight Laws of Library Technology” that's worth a read.
This is a topic that's in my head a lot having recently been introduced to Evergreen, an open source ILS whose core components were built from the ground-up in less than a year when various libraries in Georgia decided to go this route for an ILS rather than dealing with traditional corporate vendors.
And I'm trying to remember – what was the software that they used in the Digital Libraries course at FIMS? I don't think it was Evergreen but maybe something that sounded similar?
Comments 3
Hi Jason, I'll be interested to follow your experience with Evergreen; all reports so far sound good. Do you recommend the Digital Libraries course?
We used Greenstone in the digital libraries course: http://www.greenstone.org/
That was a fun course. Made me feel all techie inside 🙂
Just to clarify, we're not installing Evergreen in my library system. I heard about it at a presentation that was made during a recent meeting of librarians from across Saskatchewan. That was the first I'd heard of it but, as an open source fan, it really caught my attention.
I didn't take Digital Libraries (which is why I couldn't remember the name of the software.) I heard mixed reviews from people who'd taken it which, when combined with the fact that I already had a bit of experience with digitization projects plus the always popular “scheduling conflicts”, are reasons why I decided to skip it.