Evergreen (software)

Evergreen is an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), initially developed by the Georgia Public Library Service for Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES), a statewide resource-sharing consortium with over 270 member libraries.

Beyond PINES, the Evergreen ILS is deployed worldwide in hundreds of libraries, and is used to power a number of statewide consortial catalogs.

In 2007, the original Evergreen development team formed a commercial company around the software, Equinox Software, which provides custom support, development, migration, training, and consultation for Evergreen. As of 2014, several more companies and groups also provide support and related services for Evergreen.

Evergreen was developed by the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) to support 252 public libraries in the Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES) consortium. Development began in June 2004 when state librarian Lamar Veatch announced in an open letter that after reviewing options available, GPLS decided to develop its own library automation system. GPLS believed it could develop a system customized to fit its needs better at a lower cost than the fees currently being paid. Programmers in the GPLS developed the project for two years, and PINES successfully completed the transition to Evergreen in September 5, 2006. In the next two years, the PINES consortium increased to over 270 libraries and five other systems in the United States and Canada implemented Evergreen.

The software started receiving contributions from other libraries and developers in 2007. 2009 saw the first Evergreen International Conference. In 2012, the community joined the Software Freedom Conservancy and formed an oversight board.

Other Evergreen implementations in North America:

Development priorities for Evergreen are that it be stable, robust, flexible, secure, and user-friendly.

Evergreen's features include:

Evergreen also features the Open Scalable Request Framework (OpenSRF, pronounced 'open surf'), a stateful, decentralized service architecture that allows developers to create applications for Evergreen with a minimum of knowledge of its structure.

The business logic of Evergreen is written primarily in Perl and PostgreSQL, with a few optimized sections rewritten in C. The catalog interface is primarily constructed using Template Toolkit with some JavaScript, and the staff client user interface is written in Mozilla's XUL (XML + JavaScript). The user interface for most new staff client functionality is being built with the Dojo Toolkit JavaScript framework. Python is used for the internationalization build infrastructure. EDI functionality for the acquisitions system depends upon Ruby support.