FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norcross, GA —August 17, 2011

The community of Evergreen libraries has had a busy six months (January through June, 2011) owing to the addition of 114 library systems with 140 separate branches and outlets. This six-month experience eclipsed the growth seen in the community in any previous year.

In July, a blog post detailed cumulative summary numbers in the growth of Evergreen since its first libraries were migrated in 2006. See the “State of Evergreen, June 30, 2011” (http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=602).

For this six-month period, most of the migrations were of public libraries but also included two academic libraries, a special library and two K-12 libraries. K-12 libraries are currently one of the fastest growing types of library in the community.

Most of the migration activity centered around consortia—a continuing strength of Evergreen—both by adding libraries to existing consortia and by welcoming new consortia: Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC) in Massachusetts and the NC Cardinal consortium in North Carolina. MVLC migrated its first group: 35 systems with 41 outlets over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend and NC Cardinal's first library went live with Evergreen in late June.

BibliOak, a project of the Connecticut-based Bibliomation consortium, also had a large migration in June. Amy Terlaga, Assistant Director for User Services at Bibliomation, summarized the migration and their plans: “With Evergreen, last May we were able to fold in our 48 public library members to an already thriving network of 10 public libraries and three K-12 schools. Now we're about to add our 19 K-12 schools in time for the new school year. We're thrilled to have such a robust, flexible open source system that allows for easy configuration given our ever expanding needs.”

Reflecting the fact that Evergreen is open source, free software, there have been a variety of methods used by the various implementers of Evergreen over time. Unlike proprietary systems, where libraries are locked into one vendor, with open source, there is an array of choices for libraries. Many of these libraries and consortia migrate using their own staff and resources; others use open source vendors for some or all parts of their migrations and subsequent support. The growth of the community and the growth of choices for its users have resulted in a healthy, robust ecosystem as reflected in the experience of the first six months of 2011.

About Evergreen
Evergreen is a robust, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. However, it has also proven equally successful scaled down for even the smallest libraries.
Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 280-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 almost 1000 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community includes libraries across 4 countries including 18 U.S. states and 8 Canadian provinces.
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 services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, training, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

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

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 770-709-5571
Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.