The Evergreen open source library system has been adopted by a number of libraries across Ontario - public, academic, special - and is of interest to many other sites. Built on the OpenSRF architecture that enables scalable, clustered Web services, Evergreen offers a solid base system for a library. One of the most important aspects of a system is its ability to be tailored for a particular organization, and while an open source system is by definition utterly customizable, it's not necessarily obvious or easy.

In this workshop, Dan will help you capitalize on Evergreen's openness to extend and enhance the system for your library. Together, we will break OpenSRF down into its constituent parts (JSON, XMPP) and put it back together again in Perl, Python, and JavaScript so that you can define new services, or integrate existing services into other applications and websites. You will learn how PostgreSQL underpins Evergreen's search indices and how to access and modify any data in the system with permission-based storage APIs; plus we will build new interfaces with the Dojo JavaScript framework Evergreen extensions. With Evergreen, the source will be with you - always! Use the source for the good of your library, and help build the Evergreen library system for Ontario and the world.

Dan Scott is the Systems Librarian for Laurentian University and has been a core contributor to the Evergreen open source library system since September 2007. He is a published author of one book and a number of articles, and has presented extensively on Evergreen. Dan's blog is at http://coffeecode.net.