An Evergreen talk I gave to FSOSS at Seneca College in October of 2008.

1. Evergreen: an enterprise strength OSS solution for library ossification, Part 1. John Fink Digital Technologies Development Librarian McMaster University

2. My relationship with the ILS, 1995-2008:

3. Hey but... What is an ILS?

5. They replaced...

6. In other words... It handles a lot of what we typically get in our heads when we think library , even though the nature of the library – especially in academia – has changed dramatically over the last fifteen years or so, with the rise of databases, websites, reference services over IM and SMS, things like that.

7. But about fourteen years ago, when everything was changing, just around the time I installed Slackware and bought a jar of hot sauce over the Web and thought holy crap, this is the future , libraries pretty much were their physical collections – those books and magazines – and had been since, well, the invention of libraries.

8. And the ILS, then, was a major thing.

9. It ran on Important Machines :

12. And we paid. We paid because we couldn't do it ourselves, and the benefits that the ILS gave us over the card catalogue were wonderful.

18. So we decided, in early 2007, to move off our various proprietary ILS systems to something called Evergreen. We formed the Project Conifer to do this.

22. Break the shell and you'll find magic.

27. At the risk of sounding like this guy:

28. Or (maybe) worse yet:

30. tl;dr If you can't open it, you don't own it.

32. Because it's not cheap – there are hardware and opportunity costs involved, and just about any change means at least some modicum of training, and a whole lot of headache.

33. Ten years on?

34. One year later, they went out of business.