My first book has been published! While the book is called Library Mashups, there are several open source examples I want to point out.

• Chapter 9. Library Catalog Mashup: Using Blacklight to Expose Collections

• Chapter 11. Mashups with ‡biblios.net Web Services
• Chapter 12. SOPAC 2.0: The Thrashable, Mashable Catalog

Learn more about the book on the official book site.

David Schuster has been working hard to get the videos from KohaCon up on the Internet Archive site. For now you can see two videos there:
MySQL with Joe Atzberger and Using MarcEdit with Koha - David Schuster.

Keep an eye out for more down the road.

Technorati Tags: kohacon09

I received this message today about a series of 6 case studies of libraries making the switch to open source systems:

For the past year, 6 libraries from Malawi to Nepal have been learning a great deal about free and open source software (FOSS) integrated library systems (ILS). Case studies of their investigations, successes, and learning points are now available. The participating pilot sites in this project range from the relatively small (50,000 to 70,000 volumes) to the very large (more than 4 million volumes). They also stretch from libraries with a single systems librarian to libraries with an entire IT team. This project was not merely about installing and using a FOSS ILS; it was about learning to engage with FOSS development and support communities. It’s all about participation. We are delighted to report that the technical leads from each pilot site (and the teams they managed, where those existed) have taken engagement seriously. So much so that eIFL.net libraries are now regular contributors to the Koha http://www.koha.org/ and Evergreen http://www.open-ils.org/ ILS development and support communities. With the publication of these case studies we hope many more libraries within the eIFL.net community will take up the challenges and opportunities that come with FOSS in libraries.

This is a project that somehow stayed out of my radar, but I’m very happy to hear about it now and get to explore the 6 case studies.

• Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia (Evergreen);
• Mzuzu University, Malawi (Koha);
• Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako, Mali (Koha);
• Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Nepal (Evergreen);
• Midlands State University Library, Zimbabwe (Evergreen)

I vaguely remember seeing mention of Firefox adding collections a while back, but I didn’t pay it much notice. Today I was doing my research on Firefox and saw what a collection really is!

Firefox collections are lists of add-ons put together by Firefox users! I did a search for library to see what librarians were recommending as Firefox add-ons and found a bunch I hadn’t heard of before. What a great way for us to share our knowledge with each other!

A few collections that I took note of were:

• Law Librarian Recommended Add-ons

• Library & EdTech Add-ons
• Reference Desk

Don’t see a collection that meets your needs? Add one!! I love open source

COLUMBUS, OH --August 20, 2009-- LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that WALNET (Walla Walla Area Library Network) in Washington, has selected a Koha ZOOM hosted solution for their next integrated library system.

Found via Library Web Chic:

Packt Publishing which publishes some wonderful books on open source software. In addition, the sponsor awards for open source CMSs. Nominations are now for their open source CMS awards. There are several different categories in which CMSs can be nominated. For more information check out the award page on Packt’s website.

We have until September 11, 2009 to place our votes for our favorite CMS.

This is pretty awesome:

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it’s open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time.

I wonder if this will make Tr.im more or less appealing than TinyURL and bit.ly.

I just read this post by Thomas Brevik and I have to say I have never thought of sending a resignation letter to a vendor But I love the image!!

Today I sent the resignation letter to our current ILS-vendor. The point of NO return has passed:-)

It promted another round of “OMG why am I doing this?” It is in many ways a leap of faith. We are the first library in Norway to switch to Koha, the translation is still not completely done and who knows what bugs and surprises we will get when we go live sometime in October. This would of course be true independent of the system we switch to, commercial or open source. The important thing for me, who initiatet the whole thing, is that with Koha we are looking forward, we will get more features than our current ILS can deliver or develop in the forseeable future, and we introduce the concept of open source into the norwegian library systems marketplace.

So this is my call to you to resign from your current ILS and give Open Source a shot!!

COLUMBUS OH - August 5, 2009 – LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries and Salina Public Library in Kansas announced today that the library has selected a Koha ZOOM hosted solution for their next integrated library system.

Okay, so I’ve never used the products that William Shields mentions in his blog post, but the theme still applies. One of the biggest worries about open source is the lack of documentation. I attended a conference last year where one of the attendees asked the speaker about documentation and open source - her concern was that there wasn’t enough documentation for many of the products she wanted to use. Of course I had to follow up after her and say that Koha has amazing documentation (no - I’m not saying that cause I wrote the manual - there are actually a lot of docs that I didn’t write for Koha as well). Anyway, William Shields expresses his frustration with lack of documentation on open source products:

RTFS

This one is predictable. Some will argue that the source code is sufficient documentation. Bollocks to that. While at some point it is inevitable you will end up reading or stepping through the source code of any framework or library you use for any non-trivial purpose, the fact that you have the source code is no substitute for high-level documentation that describes the overall architecture and design principles as well as how to get started and how to do common tasks.

DIY

Another popular defence of poor OSS practices is you can get involved and do it yourself. While theoretically true it is typically completely impractical. For one thing, before you can document something you have to know it. How do you learn it without reading the (non-existent) documentation?

I’m with him on this - it’s bollocks! Not everyone using open source is a programmer - some are just average folks and they need documentation - documentation written in English (or their native language) not programmerese. For that reason, I try to only recommend products that have readable documentation

My husband thinks I’m nuts because I love keeping catalogs of our books, movies, music, etc etc. I use LibraryThing for my books - and love it to bits, but if you want to catalog your other collections you might want to try out some of these open source applications that I found on OStatic:

• Tellico - This KDE app comes with handy templates for managing your book, wine, video game, coin, or stamp collection.
• Griffith - Keep your movie collection in order with this app that automatically grabs film information and cover art from the Internet.
• GCstar - Designed for use on systems with gtk2-perl, this app helps you maintain all kinds of collections from stamps to mini-vehicles.
• Alexandria - If you need a simple app to manage your monstrous book collection, then check out this Alexandria for the GNOME desktop.
• Sisimizi - This Windows-only video game database app comes packed with lots of handy features including a scripting system to fetch game info from the Internet, customizable data fields, and loan manager.

Learn more here.

What’s your full name (middle name too)?

Maria Elena Laude

What is your official Job Title?

Application Support Librarian

Did you (or do you) have a nickname?

Not that I can share in public.

What’s your favorite color?

Blue

What’s your favorite food or meal?

Sushi  - The Tampa Roll

What’s your favorite word (keep it clean)?

CHOICE.

Are you a dog or a cat person?

Big Dog, definitely.

Do you have any pets?

I’m on the road too much to have any pets that would still be around when I get home!

Why did you want to work with LibLime? 

Because of Marc Roberson  :-)   But seriously, because the company is doing exciting things with technology and has broken out of the mold (and moldiness!)  of big “Corporate America”.

What did you know about open source before taking on this job?  

Not much.  But I sat next to and had a delightful conversation with Eric Raymond last year!

What have you learned since taking the job?

I have learned how to use a Mac for the first time in my life. And  I’m learning that open source requires some patience and acceptance of how dynamic development can be, and that sometimes you have to be a little flexible.

What’s at the top of your wishlist for the next version of Koha?

New developments should be supported for both Firefox and IE.  There are just too many libraries out there using IE to ignore it.

If you had all of the skills, time and money, what open source application would you like to develop? 

I would like to get more resources devoted to Koha.  The possibilities are endless if the resources were available.  The software is great now, but imagine all the little tweaks and enhancements we could build into Koha if more money and people were available for development.  We would put all those “other vendors” right out of business.

What are your top three favorite websites?

• pandora.com
   
• xkcd.com
   
• www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~lynn/jardin/SCG

What would you do if you won the lottery?

After paying off my debts, I would love to open a non-Starbucks coffee place.  But this would be a 24-hour coffee and wine bar, with plenty of seating areas and wireless access (of course!), live music, subdued lighting.  A place you can go in the morning for your caffeine, and in the evening for your nightcap! 

Are you an organized desk person or a messy desk person?

Organized. I’m so organized that sometimes I delete things and realize I should have kept them!

Anything else you want our readers to know about you?

I’m not your typical librarian.  But then again, I don’t think any of us at LibLime are!

Yesterday I read this awesome post by Kirrily Robert about being a woman in open source. This post is a summary of her talk from OSCON about standing out in open source as a woman.

So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.

Another example someone suggested is walking into a sports bar on game night wearing the wrong team’s jersey. It can be the most friendly sports bar in the universe, but you’re still going to feel pretty awkward.

So as a woman in open source, it can be a bit like that. You walk into a space, and you feel like you stand out. And there’s enormous pressure to perform well, in case any mistake you make reflects on everyone of your gender.

I haven’t felt this way in the Koha community - which says something great about the people involved in Koha - but I do sometimes feel like I know less than the others on the project because I can’t program in Perl and submit substantial patches. One way Kirrily recommends making women and community members in general feel welcome is to thanks them for even the smallest of contributions - once again - something I have seen done in the Koha community plenty of times!!

Value all contributions.

Large or small, code or docs or bug reports or organisational tasks. All are valuable to your project. Say “thank you”. You don’t have to be the project leader to do this; anyone can do it, and it makes a big difference.

The entire post is well worth reading even if you think your project is creating all participants equally.

I am a Google Office user because work has Google Apps for us all, but maybe I should start using Google for work and Zoho for home. In a post by Matt Asay he talks to Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. He notes that the back end of Zoho is completely open source.

Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it’s doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.

Without open source I can’t imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn’t work.

Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn’t support, however. Because it’s open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can’t handle transformations.

Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.

We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.

Awesomeness! Read the entire post here.

A few months ago I was asked to come to Norway to give a keynote on openness and libraries. Now I’ve learned that at least one library in Norway is on the right road

Thomas Brevik, librarian at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (in Bergen) selected Koha for his library. He selected Libriotech to help him out with this project : Libriotech is a company recently created by Marcus Enger, who starts on his own for now. I had been in Norway in February to meet up with Magnus, who was thinking about starting a business with Koha there at the time, and to also meet several librarians interested in Koha. We talked about our experience with Koha in France, and about the ways in which BibLibre might help Koha flourish in Norway.

This from BibLibre. Very cool.

As for me - I will be in Norway in November to sing Thomas’ praises and talk about openness in libraries.

I have often written about governments and open source alternatives, today I found an organization that is trying to encourage open source software use in the US government:

Open Source for America (OSA) is an effort to raise awareness in the U.S. Federal Government about the benefits of open source software. We hope to encourage the government’s utilization of open source software participation in open source software projects, and incorporation of open source community dynamics to enable transparency.

…

Open Source for America includes a diverse cross-section of technology industry leaders, associations, non-governmental organizations, communities and academic/research institutions.

There is a new open access journal devoted to the law of Free & Open Source Software. We all know the basics of the GPL and other such licenses, but sometimes we get confused with the minutia - now we can keep up with the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review and learn about the legal aspects of the software we all love!

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

This from Actuate’s recent open source survey:

• China reveals high adoption rates with a large majority of those surveyed (80.3%) using open source software. In all regions surveyed the main perceived benefit of open source software is no licence costs. However access to source code was uniquely given a 72.6% rating by Chinese respondents.
• In North America two-fifths of respondents are already using open source (41.0%) with close to one-tenth of respondents either in the process of adopting or planning to adopt.  The proportion of respondents who feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors (56.8%) is nearly seven times higher than the proportion that disagree (8.4%). These results are even more positive than in the previous survey. 
• Europe continues to capitalise on its early recognition of open source software’s potential, in particular France where over two thirds (67.0%) of the respondents already use open source software and Germany where the proportion using open source software has increased this year to 60.6%.  This contrasts with the UK at 42.1% adoption and the USA at 41.0%
• Germany’s attitudes to open source adoption continue to be more positive than neighbouring UK.  For example the proportion of UK respondents who feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors has decreased this year to 47.0% (from 54.0% in 2008) whereas Germany scores 62.0% in favour of open source, a notable increase since last year’s survey.
• The UK shows little change since last year with just over two fifths (42.1%) already using open source software.  Significantly the UK continues to demonstrate a degree of reticence towards open source adoption with almost a quarter (22.4%) still monitoring developments but not yet evaluating. 

In short - open source is everywhere

Awesome!! I just discovered that there is a site devoted to those who teach open source.

TeachingOpenSource.org was set up in March 2009 to serve as a neutral collaboration point for everyone involved in Teaching Open Source, where we can:

• Work out Open Source educational models, support and funding schemes, community relationships, and other issues.
• Advocate for the changes that are necessary to further the goal of teaching Open Source.

The initial collaboration points were this wiki, the Planet, and the TeachingOpenSource Mailing List; these have been extended with the #teachingopensource IRC channel and a monthly conference call.

I’m off to read and learn more - share with those around you who are teaching open source - this might be a very handy tool.

I’ve been catching up on blog reading and learning about all kinds of great open source learning tools. In addition to yesterday’s post about teaching open source to students, I found this great list of tutorials for open source applications from OStatic. It includes tutorials for OpenOffice, GIMP, Linux and more. Make sure you share these tutorials when teaching your colleagues about open source.