After talks by Joe Lucia, Bob Molyneux and Joshua Ferraro we had a Q&A sessions at the VALE symposium. I’m going to put these in note format so that you can hopefully follow who said what:

Q: One person’s enhancement might be another person’s bug - how do you control that with open source?
A:

• Joe - the release process depends on who gets to commit final changes to the code base - the community needs to figure this out over time - not every enhancement necessarily has to be released to the common code base
• Josh - depends on the project - in the Koha community the community votes on a release manager and that manager gets to decide what’s included in the release

Q: Can you give us an example of what you mean by peer review process?
A:

• Joe - VuFind is a great example - the community is not large get - peer review is dependent on what works well among experts - academic versus non-academic is not an issue as it is in journal peer review
• Josh - two types of peer review - one from the user perspective and the other from the developer’s perspective
• Bob - it’s not a formal process like journals - it happens in the community by peers - but not an editorial board

Originally uploaded by nengard

Q: Can you explain more what kinds of staff changes need to be made to support open source?
A:

• Joe - staffing changes may be at the expense of some librarian positions - but it’s a necessity - it becomes the smart thing if you’re invested in your infrastructure - need to have a technological staff in house that can handle these new systems
• Josh - you have to have technologists involved - they don’t have to be in the library - but they have to be involved - no vendor lock in means you can start with a company and move on to supporting it yourself if you so choose
• Bob - library schools teach IT separate from the library people - you need to teach it both at the same time - there is no reason to have either or (like me) - there is no a critical mass of librarians with these skills because library schools are not turning them out - and this failure has occurred during the golden age of libraries - the patrons are beating their path to our door - but we don’t have the skills - it’s a shame that Josh had to to what he had to do in creating a company to ease his frustrations

Q: People are talking about the ILS going away, why are we developing something new if that’s the case?
A:

• Josh - circulation is not going away - acquisitions is not going away (whether it’s print or electronic materials - they have to be acquired in some way) - cataloging is not going away - these are core functions of the library - the only difference is that with the open-source ILS the community drives the innovation - the community decides what they need and the products are developed to meet those needs - this means we have a more timely product
• Bob (great analogy) - one author writes an article about a problem and then another librarian comes around reads it and sees something the first author missed and writes another article - and the original writers says “thank god - you figured it out” - it’s the many eyes theory (me: this is like my developing at Jenkins - i always had many eyes) - the open source ILS is a more valuable ILS because of this

Technorati Tags: open source, valenj, ils

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:58 pm by Nicole C. Engard and is filed under Conferences, ILS, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.