Open Air Showering at UPEI

The Robertson Library at UPEI is doing a gutsy thing: they’re migrating from their proprietary Sirsi Unicorn-based library system to the open-source Evergreen system. Over two months of frenzied activity. And they’re documenting their adventures in public.

Here’s the legacy public catalog and here’s the Evergreen-based one.

This all goes to prove my longstanding hypothesis that any technical project can be accomplished in any amount of time given the proper motivation.

Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 2:56pm

Comments

Submitted by Slavko Manojlovich (not verified) on Mon, 2008-06-02 17:32.

Speaking for the silent majority, given that this is an academic library, I am interested in the risk analysis which was performed in making this quick move to Evergreen. Slow libraries and tons of toilet paper –- hmmmm.

Submitted by Mark Leggott (not verified) on Wed, 2008-06-04 19:33.

Hey Slavko - not sure who/what the silent majority is, but I know that the feedback from library colleagues on this migration (both dedicated vendor site and open source site) is entirely positive and for lots of reasons, many of which I will list in a future post on my blog. Re risk analysis - this decision was based on a host of factors, including a good understanding of the open source community, the stability and beauty of good open source code, the honesty and skill of the techies who work with Evergreen and a UPEI staff willing to themselves take a risk. That’s all the risk analysis I need. And yes, this does fit with the Slow Library philosophy, which embraces the advantages of open source software, whether done quickly or slowly. And no, no TP was required, although if we did, it would be recycled :-)