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About Project Conifer

Project Conifer is an effort to create a consortial implementation of the Evergreen open source library system by five project partners:

When are we going live?
May, 2009

Where are we doing our work?

What are we working on or contributing to Evergreen?
Internationalization, academic reserves, acquisitions (EDI), serials, and documentation are areas to which we are contributing or intend to contribute.

What are the advantages of a consortial integrated library system?
A consortially implemented ILS creates opportunities for resource sharing amongst consortium members through service enhancements such as a single borrower's card, a union catalogue, a larger pool of staff and systems expertise, the ability to link to other campus platforms such as learning management systems, opportunities to fully develop tagging functionality and social spaces that link across institutions, and the potential for streamlining workflow within and across institutional boundaries. It also provides a means to explore the potential for a shared, regional ILS (e.g. OhioLink, Bibliocentre, Novanet, others). Our ILS environments are far more similar than they are different or unique. Removing the arbitrary differences imposed by our selection of different vendors presents the opportunity to share best practices and solutions to common problems that today are most often shared on closed ILS vendor mailing lists. Many of these the differences are cultural rather than substantive. While moving to a consortial model would be challenging, through the infrastructure work already accomplished through institutional and consortial activities, staff have extensive experience working together and have built a significant level of trust upon which shared action can happen. A shared ILS would allow participating libraries to move well beyond what could be accomplished individually. As we all wrestle with the need to invest in new areas or services, a shared ILS can provide a cost effective, sustainable core service.

Why Evergreen? Why not just purchase some off the shelf software?
Replacing our expenses in support and licensing fees for existing proprietary integrated library systems (ILS) with investment in an open architected ILS such as Evergreen creates significant opportunities to bring our collections and services into the universe of tools our patrons use and gives us much needed flexibility for future development. Circulation, reserve and OPAC systems that can pull in tagging and social networking functions, acquisitions systems that can accept patron requests from Google or Amazon and load book covers and book reviews along with bibliographic data, cataloguing that supports a range of metadata and thesauri beyond MARC - these are only some of the opportunities a modern ILS architecture presents to libraries. A community source developed ILS would also be an investment into the skills of those who implement the system. They would gain significant expertise in the enhancement and modification of the open architected ILS, along with skills in standard technologies such as databases, messaging systems, and programming languages. This wealth of systems expertise can then be applied to the development of other library services of benefit to individual institutions and even more importantly, to the consortia to which those institutions belong.

(These paragaphs come directly from the attached Project Conifer White Paper)