Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

Trent at The Simple Dollar puts together a quick guide to free software alternatives to Amazon’s 25 bestsellers. I use many of these including WordPress, Audacity, and OpenOffice, but found some new ones I’d like to try out including:

• AVG Free (instead of Norton AntiVirus)
• LiveMocha (instead of Rosetta Stone)
• QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 (instead of QuickBooks Pro)

If you’re interested in creating a website using the open-source Drupal content management system, you may want to check out this latest post from Noupe titled The Ultimate Drupal Toolbox: 150+ Themes, Modules & Resources. This handy guide provides resources for plugins, examples, and themes and is divided into the following sections:

• 75 Great Drupal Themes
• 16 of the Best Drupal-Powered Website Designs
• 30 of the Best Drupal Modules
• 25 Great Drupal Tutorials and Resources
• 15 Cheat Sheets and Debugging Tools

Google Wave, a new type of communication tool, was unveiled at the Google IO conference yesterday. A combination of email, instant messaging, and many other collaborative features, this new application will be available to the public later this year. Additionally, Google plans to make the application Open Source. PCWorld asks Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? and TechCrunch provides a detailed review of the new tool with plenty of screenshots. Below is the keynote from yesterday’s conference in which the application in fully demonstrated.

Aaron Schmidt, Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, has announced that the library has made their code available for their iPhone application. If you’ve been pondering creating your own iPhone app and want to see what they did to create the snazzy DCPL app, you can do so by grabbing their code.

I will be moderating the Open Libraries track at CIL2009 on Tuesday (March 31st) next week along with Steven Cohen. We have a great program planned with some awesome speakers. If you’ll be at the conference, please stop by and say hello! Here’s the lineup for the day:

Track B
B201 – Open Source Software
10:30 AM – 11:15 AM
Eric Lease Morgan, Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department, University Libraries of Notre Dame
Open source software (OSS) that is free to reuse, study, modify, and distribute is quickly being adopted by libraries today. From office productivity suites such as OpenOffice to library-specific applications such as ILS programs, next-gen catalogs, and Firefox extensions, the open source movement has a lot to offer libraries. This session looks at the many types of OSS available and how libraries are making use of them.

B202 – Open Source Browsers
11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Jessamyn West, Community Technology Librarian, Randolph Technical Career Center
The best part of using an open-source browser such as Firefox is having the ability to create add-ons and extensions to handle a myriad of tasks and applications. From library toolbars, OPAC searches, and right-click context menus, innovative libraries can offer patrons added functionality through these simple Firefox extensions. This session focuses on Firefox and other open source browsers and their possibilities for libraries.

B203 – Unconferences
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian, Colorado College
Stephen Francoeur, Information Services Librarian, Baruch College
John Blyberg, Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library
Kathryn Greenhill, Emerging Technologies Specialist, Murdoch University Library
The latest trend in conferences is to hold an open “camp” or “un”-conference in which the tone is informal and the program is determined by the attendees. Our panelists have all had experience organizing and hosting such events and talk about the process of coordinating a library “camp,” compare them to traditional conferences, and highlight when these camps are most effective.

B204 – Open Source Library Implementations
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM
Karen Kohn, Collection Development Manager, Arcadia University
Eric McCloy, Executive Director, Library and Information Technology, Arcadia University
The speakers discuss getting ready for a Koha implementation and share their learnings from the evaluation and planning stages. From both the librarian and IT perspective, they discuss why they were comfortable moving to open source software for their catalog, the steps mapped out on the road to migration, and how money was freed up for migration by staggering the process and provide good resources for more information.

B205 – Open Access: Green and Gold
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Shane Beers, Digital Repository Services Librarian, George Mason University
Amy Buckland, Liaison Librarian, Howard Ross Library of Management, McGill University Library Library Student Journal
The two main strategies of the Open Access (OA) movement, which strives to make scholarly literature and other resources freely available online to all readers, consist of green OA, involving the self-archiving of materials in digital repositories, and gold OA, which includes open access journal publishing. Salo discusses OA from the green side, including both institutional and disciplinary repositories. Buckland tackles OA from the gold side and looks at Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems and how academic libraries can support OA scholarly publishing at their universities.

The Dublin City Public Libraries is gearing up for its annual One City, One Book initiative which aims to get everyone in Dublin, Ireland to read and discuss Bram Stoker’s Dracula during the month of April. This year they’ve designed a spiffy new Drupal website which includes information about the book and author as well as related events, a forum to discuss the work, a blog, a poll, a quiz, related bookmarks, plenty of links to other social media websites, and even to a free audio version of the book. There’s a lot to do there and its a great example of what can be done with Drupal by libraries.

If you’re curious about how peer-to-peer file sharing works, who’s using it, and why it may be useful for educators, check out 7 Things You Should Know About P2P. As with its previous “7 Things” guides, Educause addresses the following seven questions about this technology:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for higher education?

Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager for the San José Public Library, also known as the Librarian in Black, has pulled together a list of Recommended Online Drupal Resources. The list includes handbooks, whitepapers, videos, and tutorials which are sure to come in handy for anyone getting up and running with the open-source content management system.

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, writes about Open Source software and higher education in the latest issue of Educause Review.

“Open source is an increasingly important skill set that many of today’s computer science graduates are lacking. This is not because students aren’t interested in open source, but because very few colleges and universities currently offer open-source classes. In addition to eager students, there are many professors who are very interested in teaching open source in their classrooms and labs.”

I was thrilled to be interviewed by ALA editor Dan Freeman about my mobile Web Library Technology Report, the book series I’m working on with Neal-Schuman Publishers, and open source software and libraries. The interview went up on the ALA TechSource blog earlier today.

Library Journal’s Andrew Albanese compiles a list of the Top 10 Academic Library Stories of 2008. Published in two parts, the top 3 can be found here and stories 4-10 here. It’s interesting to note that the majority of last year’s biggest stories had to do with Open Access issues. Here’s a brief rundown of his list, be sure to check out the articles for more.

1. Georgia State University Sued by Publishers over E-Reserves
2. Harvard’s OA Mandate
3. The Google Book Search Settlement
4. The Launch of the HathiTrust
5. NIH Public Access Policy Enacted, Challenged
6. The Move Toward Open Source
7. The Section 108 Report
8. The EPA Libraries Reopen
9. South Caroline Slashes PASCAL
10. The Sad Story of Orphan Works

via Open Access News

The folks at Information Today were nice enough to allow me to archive the article I wrote for the September issue of The CyberSkeptic’s Guide to Internet Research titled Drupal and Libraries. You can find it in the open access repository for the library science field E-LIS.

Dale Askey writes a very interesting column in the fifth issue of the Code4Lib Journal which was published today. In We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code, Askey identifies several issues as driving forces which prevent libraries from sharing open source software code with the community:

• perfectionism – unless the code is perfect, we don’t want anyone to see it
• dependency – if we share this with you, you will never leave us alone
• quirkiness – we’d gladly share, but we can’t since we’re so weird
• redundancy – we think your project is neat, but we can do better
• competitiveness – we want to be the acknowledged leader
• misunderstanding – a fundamental inability to understand how an open source community works

As a culmination to the Open and Libraries course I’m teaching at SJSU this semester, the students helped build and publish an Open Access Journal using an open source software program called Open Journal Systems in which they have submitted, peer-reviewed, and published their final papers. This first issue of the Open and Libraries Class Journal is now live.

Today I’ll be giving a half-day workshop at METRO, the Metropolitan Library Council here in NYC, these are my presentations for anyone who is interested in “open” topics. The main topics I’ll be covering include Open Source Software, Open Access, and Open Education and how they are relevant to libraries. I’ll also be discussing open licenses, open conferences and camps, open textbooks, and new open Web initiatives.