KCLS Awarded Prestigious National Leadership Grant from IMLS

The King County Library System (KCLS) has been awarded a prestigious National Leadership Grant by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) that will fund a collaborative project between KCLS and several partner libraries. Thanks to this generous grant KCLS will be able to share current development work on the Open Source Library System (OSLS), Evergreen, with other libraries and develop resources to make the OSLS a more viable alternative to the traditional Integrated Library System (ILS) for libraries across the nation.

Recommended Reading: The Equinox Promise

Equinox Software sent  An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community today via their blog. It’s definitely worth a read:

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

source: The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community « Equinox Blog.

Legacy ILS to Evergreen migrations

The Equinox Team is publishing a six-part series on planning successful data migrations.  Karen Schneider posted the first article to their blog, “Migration Nation, Part 1:  Thinking Ahead to a Successful Migration“.  It looks like it should be worthwhile reading for anyone thinking of migrating to open source.