The first Evergreen International Conference was held in Athens (USA) on May 20-22, 2009.  I submitted a presentation “Evergreen in Armenia” and after acceptance of the paper by the Conference Organizing Committee, eIFL sponsored my trip and Conference participation.
More than 150 participants (most from USA and Canada) were attending this meeting, and according to overall impressions the Conference was a smashing success. Conference slides are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/evergreenils/slideshows

In 3 tracks: “Administrative”, “Technology”, and “Frontline Staff” during 2.5 Conference days discussions were held on coding, documentation efforts, Evergreen implementations, future plans and much more.

Bloggers were actively blogging about the Conference events. These interpretations are available from the Evergreen blogosphere: http://planet.evergreen-ils.org/

Some of my impressions:

1. More and more libraries (or library consortia) in USA and Canada are migrating to Evergreen, or have such plans for the near future. This shows that Evergreen is becoming a stable system, having good community support, and that the library administrators are confident that they wouldn’t stay alone after migration to this new product.
   
2. Inside of Evergreen community there is increasing understanding that one of the top priorities is becoming documentation efforts. During Conference a half day “Documentation” hackfest seminar was organized. It was decided that DocBook will be used for the Evergreen documentation development. This presentation under the name “Evergreen Docs Planning Session” is available from the Conference slides area (as above). Another presentation under the name “Evergreen Documentation Lightning Talk” is available from the same place. In the “Documentation” efforts eIFL FOSS coordinators can take active participation.
   
3. Growing interest from the Evergreen team on ILS implementations in eIFL countries. Here I see at least 2 reasons. eIFL countries are good places for piloting the system stability when working with non-Latin scripts and with different exchange formats. And also eIFL country librarians can help to have more active and wide spread user communities.
   
4. eIFL country FOSS and FOSS-ILS coordinators must start more active promotion of Evergreen in their countries. From my experience on using Evergreen I can state that this initiative will allow to:

• prepare a new generation of systems librarians in our countries, well prepared to the growing demands of Knowledge based Societies;
• use Evergreen in LIS faculties for educational purposes;
• to avoid paying annual maintenance fees to the proprietary ILS vendors, and use already limited budgetary allocations more effectively.

For full program and event descriptions please visit: http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=eg09:main


Tigran Zargaryan