Overview of My Personal Library

On a day-to-day basis, I work with the Consortium of Ohio Libraries on their open-source ILS Evergreen. Whether it’s configuring new circulation policies, adjusting global system settings, or writing SQL to batch update item attributes, I’ve explored a significant chunk of Evergreen over the last 3 years. But it’s an understatment to say that Evergreen is a massive application. There’s still plenty of uncharted functionality.

Evergreen’s architecture is designed for multi-tenancy out-of-the-box and built to scale to very large consortia. In the United States, it’s the platform for a number of large public library consortia. For a personal library, it’s overkill. Developing a personal library is also an opportunity to explore the setup and administer another ILS.

For these reasons, I chose another well-known open source ILS used most often by stand-alone public libraries as the foundation for my personal library: Koha.

Goals for the personal library projected included:

• Low stakes copy and original MARC cataloging experience
• Developing data migration skills (e.g. Koha to FOLIO)
• Diversifying my ILS administration
• Design and build ILS infrastructure and networking from scratch

I’ll be cataloging my personal collection of library-related books on my local network using the following hardware.