Evergreen Turns Three

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Norcross, GA- September 9, 2009

Evergreen, the robust, highly-scalable open source library software that powers online catalogs for hundreds of libraries worldwide, celebrates its third birthday with a look back at how far it has come since September 5, 2006, when nearly 260 public libraries in the Georgia PINES resource-sharing network migrated to a single shared Evergreen catalog.

In three short years, Evergreen has experienced phenomenal growth. Evergreen is known to power live production catalogs in at least 8 states and 4 countries, including Georgia, Alaska, California, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Canada, India, and (we have heard) South Africa. A 10-library regional consortium in Texas will be live by mid-September. Well over 400 libraries are known to run Evergreen, with a cumulative population served estimated at over 6 million. (Because Evergreen is true open source—free to download, free to use, free to modify—it may be running in many more libraries worldwide.)

Evergreen, originally developed for a statewide catalog for public libraries, now runs in every type library, and can be found powering catalogs for academic and law libraries in Canada, school libraries in Michigan, the National Weather Center Library in Oklahoma, and tribal libraries in Indiana.

According to Brad LaJeunesse, company president for Equinox, the Evergreen support and development company founded by the original Evergreen developers, "The decision by Georgia Public Library Service to build its own software from the ground up was something that had never been done before on this scale. We are very proud that Evergreen’s success in Georgia has caused other libraries across the country and around the world to take notice." LaJeunesse added that Equinox was doing twice as many migrations in 2009 as in the previous year.

Lamar Veatch, Georgia State Librarian, commented about the development of Evergreen, "You only get a rare shot in having an impact. We took a big risk, but I had confidence in those guys. And by the time I got to that point, I felt like we didn’t have any other option. There was no other place to go but try this."

Elizabeth McKinney, Program Director for Georgia PINES, said, "We never imagined the level of interest the library community would have in an open source project like Evergreen. The library community was watching and waiting for us to go live on Day 1." Julie Walker, Deputy State Librarian for Georgia, added, "Who would have thought that Georgia would lead the way to a new option, really a new dimension, in library automation? I think every PINES library staff member in Georgia should take a moment to bask in the success that is Evergreen."

Since migrating to Evergreen in 2006, Evergreen’s robust, scalable framework and reliability has allowed PINES to add over a dozen more libraries to its statewide catalog. For more about Evergreen’s success story, including interesting statistics and comments from the Evergreen community, see the Evergreen community blog post,"Evergreen at Three." http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=228

About Evergreen

Evergreen is powerful, highly scalable open-source library software. While Evergreen is best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia, Evergreen also elegantly scales down to the smallest library sites. Since its debut in September 2006 as the software powering the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium, Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports hundreds of libraries of every type—public, academic, special, and school media—in 12 states and 2 countries. Evergreen is open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.

For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.

Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide comprehensive support for Evergreen, the consortial-quality, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox develops, supports, trains, migrates, integrates, and consults on Evergreen, and engages with the rapidly expanding Evergreen community. Equinox also offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113