Evergreen is software that helps patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries.
Evergreen is also people: a community of users, developers, and enthusiasts that work together to maintain, develop, and improve the software. Over 1,300 libraries use Evergreen, and the software is constantly updated, with two major releases each year. Dozens of users contribute code to each new release.
How is Evergreen different from the competition?
Openness / Longevity
One advantage of Evergreen is that it is free and open source software. It is continuously evolving to meet the needs of its users without the indirection and whims of “market forces”. Since the software effectively belongs to everyone, anyone can in theory improve and support it. You’re not vendor-locked with Evergreen, though you can certainly engage in commercial relationships with entities supporting it. No company mergers or dissolutions will ever cause Evergreen to be “discontinued”.
Scalability / Designed to handle complexity
Evergreen is a complicated piece of software, but that complexity allows it to handle and mask complexity in turn. It was originally designed for PINES, the Georgia state library system, which, by some measures, is one of the largest public library consortia. Libraries can be expressed in a tree-like hierarchy, where policy and other information can be defined at specific systems, branches, departments, etc. and inherited by descendants in the hierarchy. Certain functionality also allows you to arbitrarily group units and other entities outside of that hierarchy. Hierarchies and inheritance also play a role with permissions.
Evergreen can scale to meet the needs of load and performance, and is built with a service-oriented architecture that can be configured in clusters. It supported cloud computing before that became a buzz word.
It also supports different types of libraries: public, academic, research, K-12, special, corporate, music, church, personal, etc.
What standards and “modules” does Evergreen support?
Evergreen supports these functional areas: OPAC (with user services), circulation, self-check, self-registration, cataloging, link resolving, booking, serials, acquisitions, reporting, “added” content (Chillifresh, Content Cafe, Novelist, OpenLibrary, Syndetics)
Evergreen supports these standards and technologies: CODABAR, EDI, LDAP, MARC21, MFHD, OpenSearch, OpenURL, RDA, RSS, schema.org, SIP2, unAPI, Unicode, WCAG, Z39.50
Adapted from the Evergreen website, http://evergreen-ils.org/