Elizabeth McKinney de Garcia

PINES Director

The Roots of the PINES/Evergreen Project

10:00 - 12:00

a. How PINES Started

b. The Process Used to Establish PINES

c. How Staffing is Handled

d. Budget and Funding

e. Cost to PINES Libraries

f. Demo of Automation System

Designing a System from the Ground Up

1:00 - 3:00

1:10-?? Phone Conference with Evergreen Developer Mike Rylander

g. What would you do different if you could do it all over again

h. What you would definitely leave the same and your plans for the future

i. Wrap-up Q & A

What Makes PINES Special?

• PINES is a consortium of 46 of the 58 Georgia public library systems—a total of 267 facilities and bookmobiles.

• PINES began as a Y2K project in 1999, with the first PINES libraries going live in Dec. 1999.

• The purpose of PINES has remained the same from the beginning: to provide the State’s citizens with free and reliable access to Georgia’s public library collections

Georgia Systems PINES Systems

PINES Anticipated Growth

Why do our Patrons Love PINES?

• 1.6 million active cardholders; 1 in 5 Georgia citizens from every county in the state have PINES cards.

• 8 million books & other items.

• In FY06, PINES libraries circulated about 17 million items.

• The PINES library card is free to any resident of Georgia, and may be obtained from any PINES library.

• The PINES library card can be used at any PINES facility as if at the home library.

• Materials may be returned to any PINES library.

Why do our Patrons Love PINES?

• Users may request materials delivered from any PINES library to local library, at no charge.

• In FY06, over 452,000 intra-PINES loans. • PINES libraries agree to a common set of policies,

fine structures, and procedures--patrons have a consistent experience at any PINES library.

• While membership is voluntary, patrons have driven the demand for some systems to join PINES.

Why do our Patrons Love PINES?

What Do Patrons Like Best About PINES?

Comments from the PINES User Survey

•It is so easy to use. I love Evergreen. I can not imagine life without it!

•I love being able to get books from anywhere--especially if my library doesn't have what I'm looking for.

•I can login with my user name and not a long user number. I love the bookbags. I appreciate the status column for books on hold. I really appreciate the emails and phone calls coming in at the same time.

•You can place a book on hold from another library in the PINES system and have it delivered to your closest library for pick up--LOVE THAT!!!

•I no longer have a local library with just 30,000 books in it. With PINES, I now have a library with several million books.

• Nine (9) representatives (Library Directors) from member library systems compose the Executive Committee.

• Module-specific subcommittees (Circulation, Cataloging, OPAC, Reports, Acquisitions) make policy recommendations.

PINES Governance

What are the Benefits to our Libraries?

• Libraries provide increased access to resources; in return, GPLS assumes the costs of the automation system.

• Access, not ownership.

• Courier service to library system headquarters provided daily.

• Printing and mailing of overdue notices for all PINES libraries

•Helpdesk via phone, email or web, available 24 hours/day.

•Training for 2,500 PINES staff in libraries across the state.

•Economy of scale: PINES annual cost is approximately $1.6 million. Compare to over $15 million to replace PINES with individual library automation systems, and approximately $5 million per year to maintain those systems.

What are the Benefits to our Libraries?

PINES member libraries pay $0.00

What are the Benefits to our Libraries?

Bu

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et and

Fu

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ing

 

EXPENSE

   

DIVISION 07 08

     

PINESDaily courier Service to 46 PINES library system headquarters, M-F 207,000.00 325,000.00

 Server cluster housing, electric, redundant connections 106,560.00 100,000.00

 Equinox software development and support services 0.00 350,000.00

  Georgia State University 101,000.00 0.00

  Sirsi 197,500.00 0.00

  Sun 55,575.00 0.00

  Overdue notices 272,136.00 310,000.00

  Staff Travel 23,136.00 20,000.00

  Contracts (special programming, etc.) 34,597.00 15,000.00

  CCG 200,000.00 0.00

  Other Operating Expenses 58,318.00 60,000.00

  Supplies 1,451.00 60,000.00

  Equipment 75,941.00 80,000.00

  Total 1,333,214.00 1,320,000.00

Staffing for PINES/EvergreenCurrent Staff

• Director• Program Manager (Currently Advertised)• Public Services Coordinator• Cataloging Coordinator• Administrative Assistant • Development Manager• 3 programmers

Yes, that’s only 9 nine staff members.

Planned Staff

Production• Director

• Program Manager (Currently Advertised)

• Public Services Coordinator

• Cataloging Coordinator

• Administrative Assistant

• System Administrator (Soon to be Advertised)

• Software Development Manager (Job Desc awaiting approval)

Development• Equinox (4 or more?)

QA Engineer (Soon to be Advertised)

Staffing for PINES/Evergreen

Radical or Just Plain Crazy?

• The 5-year software contract for PINES ended in June 2005.

• 2003-2004: comprehensive survey of library automation marketplace

• At issue: the unique needs of a statewide consortium sharing a union database and utilizing a statewide library card

• Is the software driving the policy/procedure, or is the policy/procedure driving the software? Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?

Demo of Public Catalog and Staff Client

Designing a System from the Ground Up

1:00-3:00

Evergreen Core Technologies

Database: Postgresql Logic/glue languages: C and Perl,

Javascript Webserver: Apache mod_perl, C modules Client side software: XUL Server operating system: Linux Server hardware: x86-64 Messaging core: Jabber (Ejabberd)

Evergreen Design

Server-side software is designed to run on inexpensive commodity hardware with Linux as the Operating System.

Designed to run in a clustered environment, giving it enterprise-level high availability and failover.

Evergreen's staff client is cross-platform.

Building from the Ground Up

• Focus Groups

• “Pretend it’s magic”

• Incredible buy-in from our members

• Participation from library staff throughout the development process

What We Did Right

• We listened, and designed the system based on input from library staff and patrons. This created a sense of ownership and pride in the system as it developed.

• We sent our patron data to Unique Management Services for clean up. This made the job of importing the patron data much easier.

• We performed multiple dry-run migrations. This was useful in ensuring our data migration plan was sound from A to Z. Staff were involved at every step.

• Staff from all libraries were involved in testing the alpha and beta releases; we learned a lot here about what would work on the front lines.

• We involved staff around the state in documentation and training.

What We Did Right

Hindsight is 20/20

• More Money

• More Time

• More Staff

• We worked with a very limited budget on a very short 2 year timeframe.

• Too much work over the Labor Day weekend left us exhausted for go-live morning, when we needed to be sharpest.

• GPLS Helpdesk position was vacant on go-live day.

• No Quality Assurance Engineer

Hindsight is 20/20

Hindsight is 20/20

• Day one load challenges.

• In order to troubleshoot issues, we turned logging levels up on the production system. The sheer amount of log traffic swamped the central logger servers, and in turn, made finding pertinent log entries extremely difficult.

The Future of Evergreen

Where Do We Go from Here?

• New libraries—Three systems waiting to migrate.• Link to other kinds of information (GALILEO

databases, local information, locating PINES libraries etc.)

• Offer deeper links into the GALILEO database and potentially other databases

• Enhance social aspects of the catalog: tagging, user ratings, reviews, and comments

• Acquisitions• Open NCIP• Online bill pay

Where Do We Go from Here?• Complete the Spanish translation for the OPAC• Develop the children's portal for the OPAC• OPAC for mobile devices• New approaches to holds:

– Queue management– “Pausing" holds – Home delivery, potentially through a

subscription service?– Automated phone notifications?

Where Do We Go from Here?

• Ranking system for enhancements and prioritizing bug fixes

• Devote resources to making Evergreen more of a community project than a GPLS project

• Funding Possibilities and Partnerships• Evergreen Foundation• Evergreen User’s Group

Watch our progress and get involved at

open-ils.org

egarcia @georgialibraries.org