Current state of academic reserves support for Evergreen

One of the relatively frequent questions that I run into with Evergreen is "Does Evergreen have an academic reserves module?" And the answer is: well, yes, and no. There is no official academic reserves module that is part of the standard Evergreen package that you download and install from http://evergreen-ils.org.

However, I am aware of two free-and-open-source modules that are available as extensions to Evergreen:

1. A relatively simple, straightforward module, written by my colleague Kevin Beswick, is in use at Laurentian University and recently was adopted by the emily carr university of art + design. It builds on Evergreen's bookbags feature to organize reserves of physical items by class code and instructor name. The module for that code--a mix of PHP, Dojo, and SQLite--is available on Github, and you can see it in action at Laurentian University.

   • UPDATE 2012-12-21: See the version I forked at https://github.com/dbs/library/tree/master/reserves with updates supporting TPAC integration

2. Syrup is a more sophisticated reserve system (you know it's a serious project when it has a name!), which supports all kinds of features - such as mixes of electronic and physical materials, organizing course content by arbitrary groupings (e.g. readings per week), limiting user access to the content of specific courses based on LDAP integration, and much much more. You can see a running instance at the University of Windsor and the code (primarily written in Python) is freely available from the Syrup git repository on Evergreen's git server. If you need help getting up and running, Syrup's mailing list is probably a good place to start.

So, there are at least two choices for academic reserves for Evergreen. Go ahead and pick the one that meets your needs!