Dave Shields has been using his blog to run his campaign for a position on the Board of Directors of the Library in Chappaqua, New York and has a very interesting post about who all open source developers are in fact librarians and authors.

For example, as an author of this kind of software I am known as an “open source developer.” We developers collect each set of related files into collections called “packages.” Individuals, groups, or, in some cases, companies, aggregate these packages into what are called “distributions,” or more colloquially, “distros.” Red Hat is an example of a distribution, as is SuSe. Debian is a distro created by open source developers that is also used as the base for Ubuntu, a widely-used distribution that has developed an extraordinary community of supporters, advocates, and experts.

That is the accepted view. Here is my view as an amateur librarian.

Every developer is an author producing copyrighted work that is available at no charge.

Every package is a “book” in what I have previously termed the “open source artifact.”

Most developers base their packages on prior art, and they often include parts of other packages in their new packages. This is not allowed in conventional publications, but is a matter of course when preparing a software package, due to the way in which these packages are licensed.

Developers are thus, for the most part, both authors and librarians.

Whether you agree or not, it’s a neat way to look at things - and I’m all for getting an open source developer/enthusiast on the boar of directors for a library

Nicole Burchfield, aka Librarian, Interrupted asks why libraries are spending so much on licenses for software from Microsoft:

Why do libraries spend thousands of dollars a year on Microsoft Windows licenses for pc’s that are only used for access to the internet?

….

These computers often do absolutely nothing except provide access to the internet. So why not use Linux? And while we’re at it throw some open source software on there like Gimp and Open Office? All free, all useful to patrons - how can this not be the right thing to do?

I commented noting Howard County Library which is going completely open source - but there are several other libraries out there doing this very thing. I teach classes all over the country on open source and I always tell librarians that making the switch on their public PCs (if not all PCs) to Linux and all open source software is a great option. They get more security for less cost and they get to say that they support open source! What more could you want?

I often talk about what open source software you can use in your library to improve services and save on licensing fees. Well, a few weeks ago I was at the Taylor County Public Library in Perry, FL doing some Koha training and I learned that they also use lots of other open source applications in their library. So far, they’re using:

• Koha

• Firefox
• Ubuntu
• Opera
• and WordPress

I can’t wait to see what other software they end up using (especially since I introduced them to a few new options and they’re attending one of my open source classes in May to learn more).

Read all about it.

[update] Just an update. While parts of Opera are open source, the core browser is not. So if you want to go fully open source - Firefox is your answer [/update]

The purpose of this blog was set out back in March of ‘07 with an introductory post titled Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. In it, I wrote about how we’d try to make the case for open source, and help distinguish between open-source and proprietary development/business models so that libraries could understand why open source is so important. Open source was still a somewhat revolutionary concept at the time and defending its viability has been a key focus not only of this blog but of LibLime itself.

While I have always assumed that that open source would become a de facto method for producing software in libraries, I couldn’t have anticipated how quickly it would happen. For instance, Library Journal’s most recent Automation Systems Marketplace reported that of the 607 ILS contracts signed in 2007, 57 of those, or roughly 9.4%, were LibLime customers implementing open-source ILS solutions with Koha. Marshall Breeding, referring to his report, acknowledged recently that “this figure may represent the beginnings of a major trend (Library Technology Reports; Chicago, Nov/Dec 2008; Vol.44, Iss.8, p.19).” Last year (2008) saw even larger growth in the LibLime customer base, not to mention the growth other companies now supporting open source have seen–the upcoming Automation Systems Report covering 2008 is sure to confirm this trend.

There are many reasons behind this upsurge of interest in open source, but I believe the most fundamental reason is philosophical. Libraries have a mission to facilitate open access to ideas and information for their communities, and that mission aligns itself perfectly with the open-source movement. Libraries are about openness, and open source is about openness.

However, while this blog, LibLime, and the industry as a whole, have been focusing primarily on making the case for open source in libraries, it’s time for our collective dialogue about the topic of openness to expand. Open source has become somewhat mainstream and LibLime needs to take our leadership position beyond just defending and promoting open source–there are other types of open that are critical to our industry as well.

The Elevator Pitch

Back in November of last year, during a management planning session, Galen Charlton, LibLime’s VP of Research and Development, challenged me to present LibLime’s ‘Elevator Pitch’. In other words, what’s the pitch for LibLime that can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride? As it turns out, it’s a very useful exercise, and one that I hadn’t done since we created our first vision statement back in 2005. The company vision and philosophy remain fundamentally the same, but our scope has definitely expanded and it was time time for a new ‘Elevator Pitch’. So here goes:

Libraries have a mission to facilitate open access to ideas and information for their communities; LibLime supports libraries in their mission by providing commercial services on open platform solutions in four key areas:

1. LibLime creates and supports library-relevant Open-Source software, such as Koha ILS, Masterkey Metasearch and YakPac;
2. LibLime promotes and facilitates use of Open Standards with the OpenTranslators Web Service, providing library developers with standards-based access to over 9,000 subscription databases;
3. LibLime provides a free platform for Open Data via ‡biblios.net, including a metadata productivity suite and the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records;
4. LibLime helps libraries form Open Communities of accessible digital collections, virtual exhibitions, and cultural preservation & celebration, with Kete Community Digital Archive solutions.

Each of these areas of focus represent types of open that are all critical to the library industry. We’ve spent the last four years explaining the benefits of open source, so in this post, I’ll introduce and explore one of these other types of open–Open Data–and make the case for why it’s so important.

Open Data

Historically, libraries haven’t had openly-licensed, community-maintained sources of library metadata. What we do have are:

• National libraries, and the Library of Congress, that create records and make them available freely via Z39.50 or on CD-ROM. These types of databases are openly-licensed in the sense that they are often public domain and free. However, the databases themselves are tightly managed in a top-down fashion, and often don’t contain metadata for many of the materials libraries own.
• Membership-driven organizations, consortia, and ILS vendors often provide subscription-based access to their comparatively large metadata databases, and let members add and maintain the database. This solves the community-maintained piece, but the underlying data is typically not available to non-members and is viewed as the intellectual property of the organization hosting access to the platform, rather than collectively owned by the users.

The philosophy behind an Open Data movement scarcely needs an explanation to a library audience. The mission of most libraries is to provide open, free access to ideas and information. Certainly that same mission applies to the metadata created BY libraries. If we can’t freely share the stuff we’re creating among ourselves, how effective can we possibly be at sharing with our communities?

And yet, historically, there’s been no such thing as openly-licensed, community maintained source of library metadata. So what’s the tipping point for Open Data? There have traditionally been three barriers:

• Lack of available data;
• Lack of appropriate licensing;
• Lack of supporting technology.

However, over the past few years, the pieces have started to fall into place, and we’re now seeing the beginnings of an Open Data movement.

Large amounts of public domain data are now available

2007 saw the launch of the Open Library project, with a goal of creating ‘a page for every book’. Libraries responded by donating over 30 million of their MARC Bibliographic Records, making them freely available by uploading them to the Internet Archive, thereby placing them forever into the public domain. Notable additions to the effort were data sets obtained from the Library of Congress (over 7 million records) as well as UK ILS vendor Talis (over 5 million records). Around the same time, The Library of Congress Authority file surfaced publicly in MARCXML format. And LoC itself opened up access to their records via an XML web service (MARCXML) using LCCN as an identifier, making it possible to access newly created and modified records records more easily.

The First Open Data License

Also in 2007, Talis spearheaded creation of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). This was a significant development as PDDL is the first license to address data, and in particular, sets of data as part of a database. As such it’s suitable for licensing both large sets and individual records of library bibliographic, authority, and other library metadata.

The PDDL does for data what licenses like the GPL do for software. PDDL ensures that anyone can use, modify and distribute the records, or the entire database itself.

The Web really took off as an application platform

Momentum has been building in the Web world around the Web as an application program. Long gone are the days when the Web consisted of a bunch of static, clunky HTML pages. Full-featured desktop-style applications like Gmail and Google Maps surfaced, and some of the larger organizations and communities saw benefit in releasing the toolkits they used to create these applications as open-source tools for all developers to use. Yahoo released the YUI toolkit, and other JavaScript toolkits from the open source community followed like ExtJS. Google released it’s Gears project, a powerful tool permitting offline persistent storage data in a local MySQLite database that would survive a browser crash. Cross-platform, open architecture, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), with functionality as smooth and usable as a desktop application, were becoming a reality.

RIA were all the rave when LibLime was selected as a 2007 Google Summer of Code mentor, and thus was born ‡biblios, an open-source web-based metadata editor. Last year LibLime released ‡biblios under the GPL and the software is freely available for download from http://biblios.org. If you’re interested in learning more about ‡biblios, checkout the Website. There’s also a great article written by Chris Catalfo, the lead programmer of ‡biblios in the latest Code4lib Journal that gives a history and overview of ‡biblios functionality and future directions.

Putting it all together … ‡biblios.NET

‡biblios the editor provides one part of a technology framework for community-maintained data. The other part, a web-scale, production-ready platform where librarians can search, create, share and collaborate, is where ‡biblios.net comes in. ‡biblios.net is the world’s first community-built and maintained database of freely-licensed library records. It’s more than a cataloging editor, it’s a comprehensive cataloging productivity suite including the following components:

• A rich cataloging editor with support for both original and copy-cataloging;
• An integrated metasearch engine for finding records within the ‡biblios.net database, and any other database that supports Z39.50;
• A Search Target Repository, seeded with over 2,000 Z39.50 servers, allowing users to find, create and share useful Z39.50 targets;
• Social cataloging features like Forums, and Private Messaging;
• Context-sensitive, field-specific help, available within the editor itself;
• Community-maintained, wiki-style write access to the ‡biblios.net master bibliographic and authority files;
• Future-thinking design, that will easily adapt to changing metadata and search standards, with support for RDA, MODS, Dublin Core and SRU in development;
• Free access for all to ‡biblios.net as a Z39.50 target;
• Free access for all to the entire batch of data via OAI-PHM harvesting and direct download;
• ‡biblios.net Web Services (BWS), a set of open APIs that enable programmers to write applications to interact with the ‡biblios.net database.

Perhaps best of all, not only does ‡biblios.net contain freely-licensed library records, the service itself, including the cataloging editor is made available for use at no cost. That’s right, ‡biblios.net is FREE.

The future is open…

These other types of open, including Open Data, will play a fundamental role in the library of the 21st century. ‡biblios.net isn’t the first such effort, and it won’t be the last. We’re well positioned as an industry to take advantage of new offerings like ‡biblios.net and move toward a more open, collaborative environment for library data and libraries.

I hope you’ll check out ‡biblios.net and let us know what you think. Who knows, maybe you’ll even join us in our quest to build the world’s largest repository of freely-licensed library records.

Sincerely,

Villanova and the people who work on VuFind were awarded one of the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration.

The Mellon Awards honor not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not‐for‐profit activities.

See the full press release and remember to support open source in your libraries!!!

Via the press release:

SOUTHBOROUGH, MA, November 1, 2008 - For the past few years NELINET, a non-profit library consortium serving New England, has been championing the benefits of open source software to the library community. The rise of interest in open source solutions in the library world reflects the needs of many organizations to easily develop customized and cost effective solutions for everything from integrated library systems to web site.

NELINET is truly committed to the open-source movement. To underscore this commitment, NELINET’s has just launched its new web site powered by the Drupal open source Web content management/portal system. NELINET Executive Director Arnold Hirshon is excited for what the future of open source offers for libraries, “By developing our new website with Drupal, we want to be able to show our members the possibilities of what you can do with open source software – even with limited resources.”

The release continues on to remind members that they can try out open source software in the tech sandbox:

NELINET will continue to explore other open source solutions and provide guidance to the membership looking to find efficient and productive ways to help run their organizations better. In 2007, NELINET unveiled the Tech Sandbox - an online resource where organizations can try out new library technologies with an eye to evaluating them for installation or purchase. Open source products currently available to try out include, DSpace, Harvester2, Evergreen, Koha Zoom, Moodle and MediaWiki.

I love seeing the organizations we’ve grown to respect promoting and using open source!

Technorati Tags: nelinet, open source, drupal

Up next in the open source presentation at the Pennsylvania Library Association conference was Joe Lucia. Earlier this year I got to hear Joe talk at VALE and he had much more time then to get his points across - so check out that summary. Joe started his talk by saying that he was going to change his focus from nuts and bolts to deeper view of open source. He said that open source is not about saving money - while that can often be the case, that’s not the argument for it in the long run.

His first claim is that to understand open source you have to understand the concept of the commons - which is a legal concept that goes back to English common law. He pointed us to the writings of Lawrence Lessig who he thinks is a good thinker about what’s happening with ideas and intellectual property in the digital age.

In addition to Lessig’s writing, he recommended that we look at The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler and The Success of Open Source by Steve Weber (which I’m reading right now).

Joe says that we need to take our infrastructure and move it to open source because of what libraries stand for; participatory culture, free flow of information and creation of knowledge.

Joe asks us what open source is - in the most naked sense. It’s software where you can get access to the code and use it and change it (the license says so). But in a cultural sense, I take a piece of code you wrote and then I add to it and then I put it back into the software - you get a community built set of tools that does what that community needs done. The focus in the open source world is on the process used to develop it - not the product. Innovations in process are often much more profound and compelling than the product that comes out of the process (Weber, p.56). In open source the primary focus is on making things better for users - as opposed to making something so that I can own it and you can buy it.

Joe explains how good open source products emerge:

• someone has a need, software is developed to scratch an itch
• you build or extend on work that has already been done
• components are highly modularized - you take small pieces that do things well and put them together
• simple standards and methods link them together
• instead of long complex release cycles (how many years did it take for Vista to come out - and is it stable yet?)
• Linux comes out with releases every month (fixes and features)
• a large community looking at code bugs are patched quicker - faster than the 20 guys who are testing MS

In short, open source is superior because of the way it’s built - the fact that the community is building it for the community - not for commercial reasons.

That said, there are real costs to participating in open source:

• migration costs
• support costs
• investment and development
• maintenance costs

So how do you get there (to switch to open source) in libraries when you have legacies of systems in place that do things we need to do from a business standpoint? Joe says that we all need to make some sort of payment on a monthly basis for technology in our libraries. He thinks that if we figure out how to redirect 1/4 of this money into to the development of open source software we can fund an open source revolution - an idea I like a lot!

Joe calls librarians to commit to a deeper culture of technology resource sharing in our libraries. We should take the risk of cutting off the support costs on our stabler systems so that we can redirect those funds to open source development. We need to understand why this matters to what we do culturally - library leaders need to push this agenda - it can be done and should because the open source mission matches our cultural mission in libraries.

Joe ends by encouraging us! He says that we’re almost there - there may be no system that can do everything you want it to do right now - but the more libraries that contribute the better it will get.

Today I participated in a series of open source talks at the Pennsylvania Library Association (PaLA) conference. After I gave my talk, John Houser from PALINET stepped up. You can view his slides on his blog.

John started with a very important point - you don’t have to install an open source operating system to use open source software - can run on it on Linux, Windows and Mac (depending on the software package).

I always tell people in my open source talks that when they go back to their computers (at home and work) they should switch to Firefox. John backed me up and told everyone to use Firefox because it’s not only better in all ways but more standards compliant than IE. He also advised that once you get Firefox you want to install plugins to get the most out of it. He feels that the best plugin to install is a delicious tool or a furl tool - that way you can bookmark your resources on the web. I’d add to that that you should add Adblock Plus.

John pointed out that we’re seeing public libraries replacing Windows and MS Office with Linux and OpenOffice - saving money in licensing. These libraries are saying that they’re providing better services than they could with proprietary software. He mentioned two library systems in particular, Crawford and Howard.

One of the common myths that I hear a lot is that open source is too hard for libraries to adopt, John points out that open source apps do not necessarily require more skills than proprietary software - some are even easier - like Firefox (over IE). Even Linux is getting much easier to install and comes with a whole set of applications you can use right out of the box. Why not try to install Ubuntu (the easiest to use of the Linux desktop distributions) on an old PC to create a place to play and learn.

The other big myth is that open source isn’t secure. The fact of the matter is that Windows was designed for a single user and security was as add on later. Linux was designed for networked computers and so security is inherent. Any IT professional who doesn’t know that might want to find some continuing ed classes of his/her own (that last sentence added by me).

I’ve been saying for years that librarians should learn some programming skills so that they can participate in the development of their own applications. John mentions that some librarians might respond to that by saying, “I’m the librarian and that’s not what i do …” His opinion (and I agree) is, that to maintain our relevance in the world we should all know how to program to some degree - being able to read a basic script and understand what it does is very very useful. Open source development is a way of resource sharing and that is what we do.

One other note that John added is that as librarians we’re used to answering questions - but we’re not so great at asking them - we need to learn to ask - it’s a real skill. Why? Because if we know what to ask then we can ask for developers to create the tools we want and need in our libraries.

Overall a great talk and a great group of attendees too. Keep an eye out for part 2 which I hope to write up next.

If you have some time, take this survey on Open Source Satisfaction in Libraries:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and my research topic is an investigation of factors that influence participant satisfaction with library or information management free/open source software projects. Some library-related examples are DSpace, EPrints, Koha, Evergreen, Greenstone, and MyLibrary. More general information management software includes web content management software such as Drupal, wiki software such as MediaWiki or PmWiki, or blogging software such as WordPress.

If you use or are involved with a relevant project, I would like to invite you to complete an online survey. I am especially interested in hearing from people in a range of roles, for example user, developer, release manager, or system administrator. I am keen to have responses from people who have had either positive or negative experiences with free/open source software, to ensure that I get a perspective on factors that diminish satisfaction, as well as those that contribute toward it.

The results of this project will help developers of free/open source application software projects identify opportunities to increase user satisfaction, and it will also help users identify ways in which they might contribute to projects.

I expect the survey to take between 15 and 20 minutes of your time. You may receive several copies of this message, since I am sending it to a number of project and library technology email discussion lists; however, I ask that you only complete the survey once. If you have colleagues who you think would be interested in completing it, please forward this invitation to them.

The survey is available at:

http://surveys.sim.vuw.ac.nz/survey.aspx?surveyid=205

It will be available until Friday, 14 November 2008.

I will post a summary of the results to relevant project and library technology email discussion lists, once the thesis is finished in mid-2009. A copy of the thesis will be deposited in the Victoria University of Wellington Institutional Repository (http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/).

If you have any questions about this survey, please contact me at brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz or phone +64 4 463 5780. My supervisors are Professor Gary Gorman, email gary.gorman@vuw.ac.nz and Professor Sid Huff, email sid.huff@vuw.ac.nz.

This weekend I wrote a guest post over at the Open Source blog hosted by Howard County Library. Check it out.

Many of you may know me as the Open Source Evangelist for LibLime or the author of What I Learned Today…, but today I’m a guest author here and I’m going to write about a topic that I’m very passionate about - open source and libraries.

Whenever I teach open source to librarians I always start by outlining why libraries are the prefect breeding grounds for open source. What many librarians probably don’t realize is that the open source community actually shares a lot of the same ethics, ideals and characteristics as the library world.

Read more here.