The Evergreen Project develops an open source ILS (integrated library system) used by approximately 900 libraries. The software, also called Evergreen, is used by libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins), acquisition of library materials, and sharing resources among groups of libraries.

The Evergreen Project was initiated by the Georgia Public Library System in 2006 to serve their need for a scalable catalog shared by (as of now) approximately 250 public libraries in the state of Georgia. After Evergreen was released, it was adopted by a number of library consortia in the US and Canada. It has also been adopted by various individual library systems, including the second-largest circulating library in the U.S., the King County Library System in Washington, and a number of libraries outside of North America.

The Evergreen development community has about nine active committers and roughly 50 individuals who have contributed patches. In June 2011, Evergreen joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. Somewhat unusual for an open source project, the Evergreen community is also marked by a high degree of participation by the librarians who use the software and contribute documentation, bug reports, and organizational energy. As such, Evergreen is very much about both the developers *and* the users.

Because of the nature of ILSs, Evergreen has an interesting mixture of functionality, allowing for a wide mix of skills and interests by the developers who contribute.

• Evergreen is a metadata search engine
• Evergreen is a transaction processing engine
• Evergreen is just another web application
• Evergreen is based on a robust, scalable, message-passing framework - OpenSRF