The Evergreen International Conference 2021 drew 326 attendees for three days of presentations and discussions online in late May.
The conference featured two tracks with 31 sessions and was preceded by a day of in-depth pre-conference sessions. A virtual exhibit hall was also included. The average time spent by a conference attendee at the main conference was 20.5 hours, showing very high engagement in the topics.
The conference's keynote address was by Becky Yoose, the founder of and Library Data Privacy Consultant for LDH Consulting Services, a consultancy that helps libraries and vendors navigate library data and privacy. Data security practices were echoed in several other conference presentations.
Other topics included curbside and outreach ideas, coming enhancements, revamped interfaces, geolocation in the catalog, and reports and statistics, along with eight different interest group discussions.
Two Hackfests were held on the day following the main conference, one for discussion and collaboration among developers and the other for collaboration on community documentation.
Evergreen continues to be the leading ILS for consortia and delivers local flexibility and granularity of policies that no other software can match and delivers the most interoperability for libraries via its truly open APIs. Evergreen is open-source software, licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later and is available to all for download at no cost from the Evergreen web site at https://evergreen-ils.org/
The Evergreen community is made up of individuals, libraries, companies, and other organizations that support the Evergreen Integrated Library System. Evergreen is highly-scalable software that helps patrons find library materials and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries. More than 2,000 libraries around the world use Evergreen.