Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

Yes, all of a sudden and rather quietly, Evergreen has serials support.

A few weeks ago, I finished hooking up a rudimentary serials holdings display based on David Fiander's MFHD parsing code to our production instance of Evergreen. We loaded our MFHD records from our legacy system into Evergreen and that gave us enough breathing room to keep working on the problem. By rudimentary I mean:

• limited to displaying one MFHD record per bibliographic record (a problem for journals for which you have separate sets of holdings in microfiche, print, etc)
• serials holdings were displayed for a given bibliographic record no matter what library scope you were searching in (more of a problem in theory than in practice as we currently have one copy of a given bibliographic record per library... that will change over time...)
• no way to edit the MFHD records, which is a problem as the issues we have received since migrating to Evergreen three weeks ago are starting to pile up
• limited to English labels in the interface

Here's the rudimentary serials holdings display:

The operative phrase is was rudimentary. In the past two weeks, things have come a long way in Evergreen. The primary result of my afternoon of work at the Evergreen International Hackfest, with lots of help from Mike Rylander and Bill Erickson in navigating the impressive new Dojo toolkit-based Evergreen JavaScript widgets and services in the upcoming Evergreen 1.6 release, was to add an Edit button to the holdings display that shows up when the record is viewed in the staff client. When pressed, the Edit button invokes a MARC editor so that you can copy an 86[345] field and fill in the pertinent information; or collapse holdings in the 86[678] fields, etc. It seems like a minor victory, but it was a real result from the hackfest, and that cannot be discounted!

Here's the MARC editor in action:

Since then, I've been on fire... or maybe on a slow burn, as I put a few hours in here and there, and am happy to say that when Evergreen 1.6 is released, serials support will feature:

• support for display unlimited MFHD records per bibliographic record
• holdings display scoped by library search context - so you'll only see holdings for the part of the library hierarchy that you're searching, rather than the whole consortium
• the Edit button for editing the raw MFHD record
• internationalization support for interface labels, based on Dojo string substitution

I have already committed these features to the Evergreen trunk, but I hope to add a few more pieces to the mix before the Evergreen 1.6 release is cut. We need to display the 852 field contents to identify the location of each set of holdings, and we need to give cataloguers the ability to edit some of the attributes (such as owning library).

Here are the slides I presented (largely screenshots of the serials display and edit button) for the hackfest results lightning talk that I gave with Jeff Godin of Traverse Area District Library. Jeff did some interesting work in his own right on generating feeds for recently added titles based on copy location during the hackfest.

I awoke around 4:48 am today. At the time, I thought it was just our baby kicking away excitedly. However, later this afternoon, I realized that it had been almost exactly a week ago, around 4:30 am on Monday, May 4th that I sent a broadcast email message to librarians and staff at 24 different libraries. The Conifer consortial library system, built on the solid foundations of the Evergreen open-source library system, had gone live - and I was exhausted after a long weekend of migrating all of that data. I was proud to see the Laurentian catalogue sporting a completely different look and new functionality - reviews! book covers! sharable book bags! format & edition grouping! - and excited by the promise of more to come.

Conifer represents the first flowering of an effort that began back in July 2007 with a hand-shake agreement between Laurentian University, McMaster University, and the University of Windsor to build a provincial, primarily academic, library system on Evergreen. The system is centrally hosted by the top-notch IT team at the University of Guelph. Things change, and along the way Algoma University and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine joined us as full partners, and McMaster University opted to continue contributing to the common development effort but withdrew from the centrally hosted system.

As noted, we went live on Monday, May 4th and we survived the first day. On Tuesday, May 5th we corrected a problem in our configuration that had caused some instability (thanks to Mike Rylander for providing the patch that set things straight). Since then, we have been slowly refining aspects of the system - setting up circulation rules, migrating records and items that had been missed over the weekend, polishing the Z39.50 server, fine-tuning the permissions scheme - but the core of the system is solid. We have a consortial system that stretches from the southern-most tip of Ontario to the north-west corner of the province (hello, Thunder Bay!), and so far connectivity seems good and the reliability of the system - which, upon launch, has probably become the second largest Evergreen implementation by number of bibliographic records - has been superb.

A few interesting statistics about Conifer... (have I mentioned how much I love that Evergreen is built on PostgreSQL because it becomes so simple to generate basic reports in plain SQL?):

Number of staff and user accounts per library in Conifer

conifer=# SELECT aou.name, count(au.id)
    FROM actor.org_unit aou
    INNER JOIN actor.usr au
    ON aou.id = au.home_ou
    GROUP BY aou.name
    ORDER BY 2 DESC;

                    name                    | count 
--------------------------------------------+-------
 Leddy Library                              | 19468
 J.N. Desmarais Library                     | 11921
 Algoma University, Wishart Library         |  2431
 University of Sudbury                      |  1100
 Hearst, Bibliothèque Maurice-Saulnier      |  1043
 Huntington College Library                 |   834
 Paul Martin Law Library                    |   592
 Northern Ontario School of Medicine (West) |   284
 HRSRH Health Sciences Library              |   261
 Northern Ontario School of Medicine (East) |   224
 Xstrata Process Support Centre Library     |   122
 NOHIN                                      |   121
 Instructional Media Centre                 |     9
 Laboratoire de didactiques, E.S.E.         |     7
 Vale Inco                                  |     4
 Mines Library, Willet Green Miller Centre  |     2
 Art Gallery of Sudbury                     |     1
 Curriculum Resource Centre                 |     1
 Sault Area Hospital                        |     1
 Centre Franco-Ontarien de Folklore         |     1
 Conifer                                    |     1
(21 rows)

Number of copies held per library in Conifer

conifer=# SELECT aou.name, count(ac.barcode)
    FROM actor.org_unit aou
    INNER JOIN asset.copy ac
    ON aou.id = ac.circ_lib
    GROUP BY aou.name
    ORDER BY 2 DESC;

                    name                    |  count
--------------------------------------------+---------
 Leddy Library                              | 1373197
 J.N. Desmarais Library                     |  614380
 Paul Martin Law Library                    |  229391
 Algoma University, Wishart Library         |  115156
 University of Sudbury                      |   42154
 Hearst, Bibliothèque Maurice-Saulnier      |   34276
 Huntington College Library                 |   12517
 Laboratoire de didactiques, E.S.E.         |   10284
 Mining and the Environment Database        |    9940
 HRSRH Health Sciences Library              |    7512
 Music Resource Centre                      |    7511
 Xstrata Process Support Centre Library     |    5477
 Centre Franco-Ontarien de Folklore         |    4365
 Northern Ontario School of Medicine (East) |    3779
 Northern Ontario School of Medicine (West) |    3301
 NOHIN                                      |    2647
 Mines Library, Willet Green Miller Centre  |    2617
 Curriculum Resource Centre                 |    2583
 Sault Area Hospital                        |    2515
 Art Gallery of Sudbury                     |    2237
 Hearst Timmins, Centre de Ressources       |    2202
 Hearst Kapuskasing, Centre de Ressources   |    2007
 Vale Inco                                  |    1106
 Instructional Media Centre                 |    1095
(24 rows)

What about acquisitions, serials, and reserves?

One of the reasons we had a hard migration date of early May was because it matches nicely with the fiscal year-end for those institutions who were running a traditional acquisitions system on their legacy ILS. We normally shut down all purchases for a period of weeks while we roll over the encumbrances into the next fiscal year and set up our budgets. This year, we're migrating all of the old financial data twice: first, and foremost, into the most sophisticated set of spreadsheets you'll ever see attached to a library system (as pulled together by the inestimable Art Rhyno); and second, into the Evergreen acquisitions system that will launch with Evergreen 1.6. The first migration of a given set of data is always the hardest part, so once we have the fund / order / provider data in spreadsheets, the migration into Evergreen proper will be trivial. This will give us the summer to use both systems side-by-side and refine what we need from Evergreen.

We have migrated all of our serials data from the legacy system, I just haven't enabled the display of that data in our live system. A prototype was running on my laptop for a few days until I accidentally blew it away - ah well, anything worthwhile doing is better the second time around anyway. This, too, will be part of the Evergreen 1.6 release, and will feature full MFHD compliance built on the code that David Fiander has been writing on behalf of Equinox. I should note that this first cut at serials is in some ways relatively basic; while the system in Evergreen 1.6 will be fully MFHD compliant, down to the point of letting you to edit an MFHD record to "check in" a new issue by adding a new 863 field, it won't associate barcodes with individual issues. Most of the database schema exists to support that, but there's still a large amount of code to be written on top of the schema and we need Something That Works Right Now I'm confident that that's coming not too far down the road, though.

Finally, what would an academic library be without reserves? Art Rhyno (again!) has been working with Graham Fawcett for the past six months on Syrup - a really impressive melding of the world of electronic reserves and traditional physical library system reserves that uses SIP and Z39.50 to talk to Evergreen. Syrup is just about at a full boil now, so in a few more weeks we should have it deployed so that we can savour its sweetness through the relatively slow summer months before ensuring that the taste is just right for all of our incoming students and faculty in the fall.

The following was written in response to a faculty member's complaint that a review containing a negative statement about a book that the faculty member had authored was attached to the book record in our catalogue. The facult member asked that we delete the review from the catalogue because [i]t is inappropriate for the Laurentian library to be highlighting attacks on Laurentian's faculty, undermining their work in the eyes of students and other faculty members.

My response:

On the matter of the reviews that appear as a supplemental part of the Conifer catalogue, we contracted with a third-party supplier of review content that draws from a number of sources.

These reviews are automatically matched to books displayed in the catalogue by correlating their ISBN. There is no selection being performed on the part of the Library, nor is there the ability to select or hide specific reviews for a given book in the catalogue.

It is regrettable that the one review available for your book from our added content supplier should include one negative statement; however, I'm sure you can appreciate my position that it would be an extremely dangerous policy for the Library to deliberately suppress content if said content does not support our institution.

As to your concerns about catalogue browsers confusing the providence of the review, I believe most readers would find the byline "CHOICE Copyright © American Library Association, used with permission." a reasonably clear indication of the source of the review. I agree, however, that the reviewer's name should be included, and will request that our added content supplier make this amendment to their service.

I do empathize with your position on this matter, but I hope that you can see that we are trying to draw from a broad range of review sources, and that these sources are generally considered reputable, and that as a general policy I cannot support hiding reviews that are not uniformly supportive of our institution.

I had expected the addition of third-party reviews to the catalogue to be a universally welcomed enhancement, and I naively failed to anticipate this possibility. In retrospect, it's easy to see that enriched content that helps library users select material might not please everyone. However... just as we wouldn't rip the article out of the pertinent copy of Choice if we had it on our shelves, I think we're perfectly justified in maintaining our third-party reviews in the catalogue.

Have other librarians run across similar complaints?