During her interview, one of the people who’s starting at LibLime next week asked for a list of books to purchase. I’ve put up a short reading list at LibraryThing and asked other LibLimers to contribute.

Of course, not everything worth reading is found in a book. Links to good web pages and blogs are easy enough to share, but how about LibraryThing for journal articles? What’s out there for sharing citations and articles?

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Well, a couple of us LibLimers are off to Washington D.C. for ALA Annual: Tina Burger, and I will be manning our portion of the Open Solutions Booth #2437. This year, we’re of course joined by our strategic partner Index Data as well a newcomer on the scene of Open Source in Libraries that we’re very excited about: Care Affiliates. Care was recently founded by Carl Grant, a seasoned automation veteran in libraries who most recently served as president of VTLS and Lou Leuzzi, former VP of Global Sales for Endeavor. From Care’s press release:

“[we] want to build a different kind of company, one that works as partners with libraries to jointly develop great ideas, provide needed solutions in an open environment and to do it in affordable and caring way.”

This is big news, folks! It’s amazing how quickly the library industry is shifting toward open source, I suspect we’ll see quite a few more companies form over the coming months and years with this new and exciting business model to fill the need for long-term sustainable solutions.

Of course, there will be the typical flurry of news releases at this ALA, and some very exciting announcements coming soon, so stay tuned :-).

I’m excited to announce that LibLime has been selected as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code program. Google Summer of Code offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

LibLime’s ideas page lists several projects for students to work on, most are related to Koha. Student applications are being accepted now, so if you’re a student and want to work on one of the projects we have currently listed, please feel free to apply. If there’s an idea you have that’s not listed, send your idea to soc@liblime.com and we’ll be glad to talk about adding to our list of ideas.

And thanks to my 3.5 month old son, neither do I. But seriously, due to the fact that some of us live in New Zealand and some of us live in the USA, you can guarantee that at any given time, someone from LibLime will be working on Koha. Couple that with the other developers in France, Cyprus, India, Germany, Australia, the UK (the list goes on) and you have an insomniac Koha development team.

I woke up this morning to find that while I was sleeping, Joshua and Ryan had been working on the installer for rel_3_0. While they were sleeping yesterday, I was working on my kohabot (more about that in a future post) and Mason was tweaking his graphical reports module, and thats just LibLime.

Back to my son, (I’m a proud parent, can you tell?) at 5am when I was mixing him up a bottle (I do one nightly feed so his mum can get some sleep) I was thinking about how doing this was a lot like FLOSS. I got to choose how much water to put in the bottle, how much formula, how warm to make the bottle and when to do it. I took advice from people who know more (midwives, obstetricians) about how much approximately he should be drinking and used that to guide my decisions, but ultimately as my wife and I know our son better than anyone, the decision was ours. This is the same with Open Source software, the people who know the most about their needs get to choose how to use it.

It really is the way it should be.

The LibLime Developers’ Blog is a place for LibLime’s programmers and analysts to briefly tear themselves away from specs and code and talk about free and open-source library software including Koha.