Get out of jail, go free, part I

Posted on Mon 16 June 2008 in misc • Tagged with Evergreen

As Mark Leggott mentioned in Vendor to Open Source ILS in 1 Month #1, I had the pleasure of assisting the migration of the University of Prince Edward Island library system from Unicorn to Evergreen. A little over a year ago, in discussing the business case for open source library …


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Introduction to Evergreen at eIFL-FOSS ILS workshop

Posted on Mon 16 June 2008 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

I was in Armenia last week, leading a workshop on open source library systems along with Henri Damien Laurent from BibLibre. My charge was to introduce Evergreen and lead participants in two days of hands-on experience with the system; Henri took on the same task for Koha. I cannot say …


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In which digital manifestations of myself plague the Internets

Posted on Wed 28 May 2008 in misc • Tagged with Coding

Over the past few months, I've been fortunate enough to participate in a few events that have been recorded and made available on the 'net for your perpetual amusement. Well - amusing if you're a special sort of person. Following are the three latest such adventures, in chronological order:


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Weeding 2.0

Posted on Sun 11 May 2008 in misc • Tagged with Evergreen

Okay, this is definitely a lame thing to be thinking about at midnight on a Saturday, but I was just playing with the shelf browser in the Evergreen representation of our 780,000 bibliographic records (okay, that is definitely the wrong thing to be doing at midnight on a Saturday …


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Two! 2! Too! Tu! Tout!

Posted on Sat 10 May 2008 in misc • Tagged with Amber

Ramping up

This year, we hosted a small party focusing on the little ones in Amber's life: a few of her friends from day care, and a friend from up the street.


The amazing cat cake

Lynn used the same carrot cake recipe as last year (nice and …


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Tuning PostgreSQL for Evergreen on a test server

Posted on Mon 14 April 2008 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen, PostgreSQL

Update 2008-05-01: Fixed a typo for sysctl: -a parameter simply shows all settings; -w parameter is needed to write the setting. Duh.

Once you have decided on and acquired your test hardware for Evergreen, you need to think about tuning your PostgreSQL database server. Once you start loading bibliographic records …


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Test server strategies

Posted on Thu 10 April 2008 in misc • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen

Occasionally on the #OpenILS-Evergreen IRC channel, a question comes up what kind of hardware a site should buy if they're getting serious about trying out Evergreen. I had exactly the same chat with Mike Rylander back in December, so I thought it might be useful to share the strategy we …


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Inspiring confidence that my problem will be solved

Posted on Fri 28 March 2008 in misc • Tagged with Coding

Hmm. I think I'm in trouble if the support site itself is incapable of displaying accented characters properly.

Corrupted characters in a problem report about corrupted characters. Oh dear.

Corrupted characters in a problem report about corrupted characters. Oh dear.

My analysis of the problem is that the content in the middle is contained within a frame, and is actually encoded …


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Progress with Project Conifer

Posted on Thu 27 March 2008 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

Project Conifer is the effort by McMaster University, University of Windsor, and Laurentian University to put together a consortial instance of Evergreen. A few weeks back, we agreed that May 2009 would be our go-live date. So the clock is ticking quite loudly in my ears.

Today I got an …


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Evergreen Acquisitions at VALE's Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium

Posted on Sat 15 March 2008 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

On Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to join a distinguished panel

of speakers and a crowded music hall at VALE's Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium at The College of New Jersey. I had been invited to

present an update on the state of acquisitions support in Evergreen, as well …


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