This past Friday, I had the good fortune to meet up with John Fink at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. John is Digital Technologies Librarian in the Mills Memorial Library at McMaster. Amongst his numerous responsibilities, 50% of John's time is devoted to managing McMaster's transition to a new open source integrated library system (ILS) – Evergreen. I wanted to discover where that project is at as well as a little bit about John's connection with free and open source software (FOSS).

A library's integrated library system (ILS) is the single most important piece of software in its infrastructure. The ILS touches nearly every part the library, from acquisitions to cataloguing, from patron management and lending to the OPAC and more. Libraries, as a rule, do not like to mess with their ILS. They tend to find one they like, deploy it, and then stick with it.

John came to McMaster in September after following up a job advert in the spring of 2007. What attracted him was the explicit mention of open source software in the job description. His first involvement with FOSS came while pursuing an undergraduate degree in English Literature in Ohio. In time he drifted in to IT support and then systems administration on unix-based machines, which in the late '90s and beyond were often being replaced with Linux boxes. One library science degree later and some intensive experience in a medical science library in California, and John was ready for the open-ended challenge that McMaster's libraries, now under the tender guidance of Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian, present. (Some of you will remember that Jeff spoke at the eIFL.net General Assembly meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, this past November.)

So when exactly did McMaster decide to investigate Evergreen, and why? The decision was made before John arrived on the scene. The reasons are many: part of it had to do with the announcement in March 2007 by SIRI/DYNIX that it intended to phase out its Horizon ILS, the one that is currently in use at McMaster (or rather that was the way the announcement of introduction of Rome was taken). So that meant change was in the air. Part of it certainly had to do with the great strides that the Evergreen developers were making at the time. And no small part of it must have been the fact that at least a couple other Ontario universities were serious about Evergreen at the same time (more on that in a moment). No doubt there are other reasons in the mix. A large university library does not change its ILS whimsically nor precipitously. It takes a measured view. And it plays a long game since an ILS isn't something you chop and change every year.

It is worth noting that the libraries at McMaster are not overwhelmingly FOSS driven. When John arrived there wasn't anyone else using Linux on the desktop, and even today he thinks there are only three. The public-facing machines are all Windows boxes. And there are relatively few Macs to be seen. Where FOSS had a role to play was on the servers, which are typically Red Hat Fedora Core machines. John notes that there is also some FOSS in use in the document management system and in conferencing software, an example being Open Conference Systems from the Public Knowledge Project . The decision to move to Evergreen was thus not ideologically driven.

How has John been getting on with Evergreen?

Excellent. Five months into his post he has Evergreen up and running locally on a test machine dealing with a sizeable chunk of McMaster's catalogue. But there is ever more testing to be done. In fact John was about to wipe everything out and re-install on a clean Debian machine just to be certain he has the procedure down. It's no simple thing to evaluate a new ILS. Caution is the watchword. And care. And it helps to have a lot of support.

For support, it makes a big difference that both the University of Windsor and Laurentian Unversity are evaluating Evergreen at the same time as McMaster. Art Rhyno at Windsor and Dan Scott at Laurentian are both, according to John, much more into the code than he is. (John sees himself as a deployer of FOSS, not really as a developer.) They are making significant contributions to Evergreen's development, especially in the acquisitions and serials modules. Having them nearby and willing to lend an ear (via email or on Evergreen's IRC channel) takes a lot of anxiety out of such a big move. These universities effectively have created a support and deployment consortium. Eventually they will house their Evergreen deployment on a shared Linux cluster based at a fourth Ontario university, the University of Guelph.

If migration to a new ILS is a long game, just how long will it be before McMaster has made the switch? Apparently the target for migration is summer 2008, though some slippage has been allowed for. For a time thereafter Evergreen and Horizon will run in parallel. And then eventually, at some point approximately 2 years after the original decision to migrate was made, the migration will be complete.

Will anyone notice that McMaster is using a FOSS ILS once they've made the change? Probably not. John says that good software gets out of your way and lets you get on with what you need to do. But the decision to go with a FOSS ILS makes a world of difference to those behind the scenes, especially digital technologies librarians like John Fink.

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