Representatives from COOL libraries and OHIONET recently attended the 2012 Evergreen International Conference in Indianapolis. It was an excellent event and featured keynote speakers Jano Bacon, a leading community manager, engineering manager, consultant, and author, and Galadriel Chilton, Electronic Resource Management Librarian at University of Connecticut. Many of the sessions focused on future developments in Evergreen, especially features coming in version 2.2.
Many features will benefit patrons, such as auto-suggest, SMS, patron history (loans, fines, and holds), etc. There is a lot of development in the staff client, all of which should improve staff workflows. For example, Jeff Godin of the Traverse Area District Library did a presentation on using mobile devices for inventory and collection development.
All-in-all, it was a great conference and has COOL excited about what lies ahead for Evergreen and COOL.