Georgia Libraries Get New Catalog

This is old news, kinda, but I just saw it on Slashdot: The Georgia Public Library System has just tossed out an old proprietary system for managing the catalogs of over 250 libraries, and replaced it with a new open-source system. The system is based on Linux, Apache, and PostgreSQL, and all mushed together with C, JavaScript and Perl. WOOT! I hated the old software PINES used. It just seemed so, so... 1995. But this new system, called Evergreen (get it.. PINES, Evergreen?) shows book covers, let you set up “book bags” of interesting titles. You can even share your bookbags on the internet. This kicks the butt of the old system. So I went and looked up a book I knew was in the library system: Thai Food by David Thompson. It appeared, along with the cover. I clicked on the ‘Reviews’ button and got the low-down from Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal. Of course, I already know that the book was a culinary tour de force. A quick search of ‘buddhism’ yielded over 1200 results. My only complaint is that the JavaScript (or some part of its Web 2.0 goodness) is kinda slow. Pages take more than a couple of seconds to render. Then again, I suppose there is a lot of stuff going on as the system searches for relevant titles. And it does seem at least as fast as the old PINES, even what I recall from using PINES in the library. The developers say, “It was designed from scratch for large-scale deployment in very large public library and state-wide consortium environments with tens of millions of records and hundreds of libraries.” And the librarians in Georgia love it. You can see the new version of PINES using Evergreen at gapines.org. The open source project is at OTSG Freshmeat. Yeah, its GPLed! Yay Georgia!