About
About the Evergreen International Conference
The 2012 Evergreen International Conference will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, home of Evergreen Indiana, at the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis. A strong sense of community is key to the success of any piece of open source technology. The conference is an annual opportunity for Evergreen users worldwide and
those considering Evergreen to come together for discussion and continued education. With close
to 1000 libraries currently running Evergreen in North America alone, we are expecting this year’s
conference to be even bigger than last year’s with close to 200 attendees.
Last year’s conference
The 2011 Evergreen International Conference hosted by Georgia PINES in Decatur, Georgia attracted 180 attendees and over 20 vendors.
About Evergreen Open Source Software
The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by approximately 800 libraries. The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition of library materials, and (particularly in the case of Evergreen) sharing resources among groups of libraries.
The Evergreen Project was initiated by the Georgia Public Library System in 2006 to serve their need for a scalable catalog shared by (as of now) approximately 250 public libraries in the state of Georgia. After Evergreen was released, it has since been adopted by a number of library consortia in the US and Canada as well as various individual libraries, and has started being adopted by libraries outside of North America.
The Evergreen development community is relatively small, with about nine active committers and roughly 50 individuals who have contributed patches (as of March 10th, 2011). However, the Evergreen community is also marked by a high degree of participation by the librarians who use the software and contribute documentation, bug reports, and organizational energy. As such, Evergreen is very much about both the developers *and* the users.
Because of the nature of ILSs, Evergreen has an interesting mixture of functionality. For example:
* Evergreen is a metadata search engine
* Evergreen is a transaction processing engine
* Evergreen is just another web application
* Evergreen is based on a robust, scalable, message-passing framework – OpenSRF
