Evergreen

Overview

Evergreen was launched in September, 2006 in the State of Georgia’s PINES consortium, it now powers over a thousand libraries of every type — public, academic, special, and school libraries — in many countries throughout the world. Evergreen is highly scalable and has an active community that participates in all aspects of its development.

Evergreen supports all core modules; acquisitions, circulation, cataloguing, serials and reports, as well as providing an excellent OPAC capable of searching across a consortium or individual libraries.

Evergreen for consortia

To be truly effective, consortial functionality cannot just be “bolted on” post facto. It really needs to be built in to the design of the entire system. Evergreen is built entirely around the concept of “organisational units.” When the system is first being configured we set up the organisational units that best reflect the way in which that particular consortium wants to operate. These organisational units are used to describe the constituent parts of the consortium, to group library authorities, branch libraries and sub-libraries in any permutation needed. It defines how all the constituent parts of the libraries and library systems inter-relate and interact. These organisation units are then recognised throughout the system and determine how all the modules operate.

In the public access capability (OPAC) there is a whole range of capability based around the organisational units to scope holds, to scope the libraries or groups of libraries you want to search.

For staff you can determine with a high degree of precision and granularity exactly what commands each member of staff can execute. These privileges can then vary across every constituent organisational unit throughout the system.

Scalability

The system has also been designed with scalability in mind. In addition to the core database and application servers it is very easy and cost effective to add additional server capacity comprising commodity hardware. These “bricks” increase throughput and resilience and in practical terms give the overall system unlimited scalability.

Architecture

Evergreen’s architecture is designed to be highly scalable and expandable. Further servers can be added to the cluster in any combination.

Reporting

Evergreen has a powerful and flexible reporting capability.

Standards supported

As well as SQL and SIP2 support, Evergreen offers:

• XML and JSON Web Service gateways
• OpenSearch 1.0 and 1.1
• unAPI retrieval
• Ability to export in MARCXML, MODS, OAI_DC and many other XML formats

Sedar

In 2011, Stirling and East Dunbartonshire Councils formed the SEDAR consortium and chose Evergreen as a replacement for their existing library systems. PTFS Europe carried out the full implementation and provide ongoing support. The system is hosted at the PTFS Europe data centre in Manchester and is the first Evergreen installation in the UK. The Western Isles are the most recent addition to the consortium, which is expected to grow further still.

Evergreen community

Evergreen has an active user community worldwide that participates in guiding software direction and sponsoring product development.