For this week’s blog posting I have chosen to take a brief look at Georgia Library PINES opac.I decided on this, because of my experience with the Millennium migration here at UT-Libraries. As part of the circulation team, we had to make a lot of compromises by buying a “closed system”. I decided to look into open source ILS systems and “Evergreen” the one created by the Georgia Public Library Service, appears to be the one mentioned the most. I’ve always been a fan of open source software, because of the DIY ethic behind it, and of course, the why settle for something less than you need aspect as well. They sum all of this up quite nicely in these two statements grabbed from their FAQ “We--that is, the Georgia Public Library Service and its PINES program--wrote the software because our previous automation system was failing us and every other system (proprietary or open source) we evaluated fell short in some way or another, usually due to deep design decisions.”
“We share the software because of ideology and pragmatism. We're a mix of librarians and open source advocates, and we believe information should be shared. Just as books are for use, software should also be for use. Most libraries have stopped chaining their books to their stacks, and similarly, open source software gives you freedoms you won't find with proprietary software.”
They are making their software available for free to anybody who wishes to use it. This is an ideal situation for poorer libraries who can’t afford million dollar plus systems, and because as more and more libraries implement it, many new tools and features will be developed, and will be shared amongst everybody to tweak and integrate into their system as they see fit. They won’t have to change procedures to meet the shortcomings of a “closed” system. I’ll stop with the idealistic rant at this point and discuss the actual OPAC.
The OPAC is fairly clean and is easy to navigate. The search page isn’t as developed as one might want, but I’m sure that will come in time. It allows one to search all the libraries or pick a specific branch. After having done several years of music reference it doesn’t have some features I’d like to see, such as limiting to scores, music publisher, or BWV #s, but that is me just being picky. It has reviews, and pictures of many of the items, just like normal OPACS, and it has a cool feature that I had never seen before; Shelf Browsing.
This allows you to look at the stacks virtually. By this I mean that you can see the books before and after the record that you were looking at. Besides just being able to do this by call number, you can also sort by author and a few other ways. As somebody who sends Undergrads up to browse the stacks quite often, this seems really cool. The other coo feature that might come in handy to find specific items is the Marc Expert Search feature. While not too useful for ordinary users, reference providers could help users zero in on a specific score pretty easily. Since this will all be open source, I can also see somebody being able to write an interface that could ride on top of this feature making it easier for patrons.
Overall, this ILS is promising and because some large libraries have already agreed to implement it in the future, I am sure that some libraries who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it, will have access to an ILS package that will be rich in features that they normally wouldn't be able to afford. If this, and other open source options, such as Open Library, are able to grow and integrate, OPACS in a few years could be very umm 'exciting?"
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