Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Ever need your own library system?

Does your church have a library but doesn't have any software to keep track of its inventory? Or perhaps, like me, you have several DVDs and Books that you loan out and you forget who has what.

Then take a look at Evergreen (http://www.open-ils.org), an enterprise-class Integrated Library System (ILS). It is licensed under the GPL, and is open-source software and can be downloaded for free. It's currently in use by Georgia Library PINES, a consortium of 265 public libraries. Additionally, libraries in British Columbia and University of Windsor have committed to migrating to Evergreen.

I found out about Evergreen when reading this article about OSS use in the Government. The author mentions that in some cases U.S. governments have even started whole OSS projects when it was in their best interest; examples include OpenVista, Expect, and EXRO. In fact the reason the state of Georgia started Evergreen was because they found existing commerical products were grossly inadequate.