I am reading an awesome book right now - Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe. I has read through bits of the book a few months back while waiting for my hubby to pick up a new RPG and liked what I saw.

Howe talks about the movement we’re seeing on the web these days - the movement from a few experts working in their field to thousands of amateurs working in many fields. The book itself is well worth reading cover to cover, but the part that I’m clinging to is the correlation between crowdsourcing and open source.

Crowdsourcing has it genesis in the open source movement in software. The development of the Linux operating system proved that a community of like-minded peers was capable of creating a better product than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Open source revealed a fundamental truth about humans that had gone largely unnoticed until the connectivity of the Internet brought it into high relief: labor can often be organized more efficiently in the context of a community than it can in the context of the corporation. The best person to do a job is the one who most wants to do that job; and the best people to evaluate heir performance are their friends and peers who, by the way, will enthusiastically pitch in to improve the final product, simply for the sheer pleasure of helping one another and creating something beautiful from which they all will benefit. (p.8)

There are many great passages like this throughout the book and that’s why I’m recommending it to those who attend my open source classes as a way to learn about open source without having to read the techie books (which are also great - but sometimes hard for librarians to wrap their heads around) like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In addition to learning about the community and philosophy behind open source, readers will learn to understand the way people are interacting with information on the web - and the fact that librarians aren’t the only experts out there - we need to start tapping into the knowledge and skills that are locked up in our patrons.

Chris Catalfo has a post over at Thingology about the integration of Library Thing for Libraries in Koha 3.2.

The 3.2 version of Koha (which isn’t out yet) will include the improved integration for LTFL. If you are using Koha without a host, and run on the bleeding edge, you can try it now via Git.

What this does is enable and disable LTFL through the Koha Enhanced Content system preference page. Simply enter your LTFL account number (found on your LibraryThing for Libraries Account page), decide where you’d like LTFL content to display (in tabs or under other bibliographic details) and enable it. No need to edit Koha templates.

I have gotten to see it in action in my test system and it’s awesome!!!

Technorati Tags: koha, librarything

There have been some great upgrades to the Open Library that I want to bring to your attention. This from the Open Library Mailing List:

Open Library has been upgraded to new software with lot of improvements.

* Readable URLs.

Title of the book/name of the author is now part of the URL.

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL20463982M/The-Adventures-of-Tom-Sawyer
http://openlibrary.org/a/OL5991132A/Mark-Twain

* Better default cover images

The default cover images now look more beautiful with title of the book on the cover.

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL20463982M/The-Adventures-of-Tom-Sawyer

* improved type system

With the improvements to the type system, it becomes easier to model more complex data like table of contents.

example: http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7407773M/LaTeX

* More APIs

New RESTful API is carefully designed to make it easier to access the data in fewer requests with support for javascript callback to use it directly in the client-side.

http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/restful_api

There is even a python library for accessing the API.

http://github.com/openlibrary/olapi

Along with these APIs, John Miedema’s OpenBook wordpress plugin has been implemented in pure javascript using OL Books API.

http://github.com/openlibrary/olapi/tree/master/openbook

I have been reading The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber and wanted to share some of what I’ve learned. Steven Weber is a political scientist and so he approaches his analysis of open source from that viewpoint. For me it was a bit hard to take off my programmer/librarian hat and put on a political one - but it has been an interesting read.

Weber starts the book:

I’m a political scientist and I worry more about how communities are governed than i do about technology per se. I became interested in open source as an emerging technological community that seemed to solve what I see as a very tricky but basically familiar governance problems, in a very unfamiliar and intriguing way. In the end I’ve decided, and I argue in this book, that the open source community has done something even more important. By experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance. At the same time, it is remaking the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important. (p.vii)

Makes open source sound pretty powerful - doesn’t it?

Throughout the book Weber talks about how each open source community, while spread across continents and time zones, has come up with its own ways of governing and keeping order. He focuses on the most famous open source example - Linux - and shows how the software grew and how the community keeps tabs on its future growth.

Weber talks about licenses and their role in the open source world:

Open source collaboration depends on an explicit intellectual property regime, codified in a series of licenses. It is, however, a regime built around a set of assumptions and goals that are different from those of mainstream intellectual property rights thinking. The principal goal of the open source intellectual property regime is to maximize the ongoing use, growth, development, and distribution of free software. To achieve that goal, this regime shifts the fundamental optic of intellectual property rights away from protecting the prerogatives of an authors toward protecting the prerogatives of generations of users. (p.84)

He continues on to talk about conflict resolution in the open source world. He points out that sometimes these battles can get very heated because people have such a stake in the software they are developing. It’s interesting to see this front hand while working on an open source project. One thing I say in my talks is that open source developers love their products - and this is very clear as these conflicts become personal. Weber explains the various ways that this conflicts are resolved in different environments. In smaller open source projects it’s harder to resolve differences because there is no one governing party, but in the larger projects it becomes a bit easier.

For example (since I know it well) the Koha project has a team of managers who have worked very closely with the project either from the beginning or for an long enough time. These ‘managers’ look out of the Koha product on the whole and are usually the ones who contribute the most patches/code/input. In the Linux world, Linus Torvalds plays the role of manager - an excellent one according to Weber.

While I had a hard time following some of the very political parts of this book, it has been an interesting read and should be required reading for anyone who’s just jumping into the open source world. I’d also recommend it to librarians who want to learn more about open source - but aren’t terribly techie - since this title looks at things from a non-techie angle.

I haven’t gotten a copy of this report yet, so I can’t tell you (first hand) what’s covered, but I didn’t want you to miss out. So, if you get a chance, stop by your library and check out a copy of the newest Library Technology Report by Marshall Breeding (that’s what I’ll be doing).

In this issue, Breeding details the differences between using an open source approach to that of using conventional proprietary software for automated operations.

“In the past, our options were differentiated on the basis of features, functionality, price, and performance of the software and the perceived ability for a given company to develop its products into the future and provide adequate support. Do these factors differ with open source ILS products?”

Breeding’s report can help answer that question as well as defines open source and provides an overview of the various open source options currently available to libraries, including Koha and Evergreen.

Keep an eye out for more info from me after I get a chance to read this guide.

First, if you haven’t visited Bookpool - you should! They have some awesome prices on techie books. Second, now is the best time to visit because open source books from OSCON are on sale.

While the title of Dana Blankenhorn’s post is misleading (The fastest way to learn open source) it’s still a handy post. Dana makes you think that you’re going to learn about open source, when in reality you’re going to learn open source programming.

O’Reilly’s Head First series, and it makes the Dummies series read like they were written for Einstein.

Tim O’Reilly has taken everything he and his company have learned training people in programming for two decades and condensed it into the format of this series. Even I can learn with it.

I love the O’Reilly books, but I don’t have any of the Head First books - maybe I should pick a few up to learn Perl … since Koha is in Perl and I’m a PHP girl.