Insoshi, built on Ruby with Rails, is a neat sounding new addition to both the open source and social networking worlds.

Insoshi is a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product!

Since Insoshi is open source, you can download the code from our GitHub repository and make your own social network. Then stay in touch by joining the Insoshi developer site—which is powered by Insoshi!

Features include:

• Activity feeds
• Profiles with photos and comment walls
• Connections/friending
• Discussion forums
• Blogs with comments
• Messaging, including read/replied/trashed
• Search for profiles, forums, and messages
• Admin panel with site preferences

This is well worth keeping an eye on. Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing it out.

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source.

The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District (Département de l’Instruction Publique Genevois (DIP) in March 2006, says Manuel Grandjean, project leader for the Geneva district’s Open Source migration. “The district wants Open Source software to become the default.”

Very cool - this is what I love to see. Learn more here.

I just received an announcement that Relais International will be moving all or part of their software to an open source model.

Relais International has been working with libraries to develop systems to assist in providing a full range of interlibrary loan and document delivery services, for almost 10 years.

More on this will be presented at the Seventh Annual Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference from September 18-19, 2008 at Portland Community College’s Sylvania Campus in Portland, Oregon.

For now you can read the press release announcing this big decision!

I do a lot of talks about open source software in libraries. I have a set list of open source products that I think librarians would be interested in (not necessarily library specific). I’m wondering what products you all like using. Some biggies on my list are:

• Ubuntu
• Firefox
• Pidgin

What else should I add?

Check out this list on the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN).

There’s not much there yet, but it’s a growing list - worth keeping an eye on.

Via O’Reilly Radar:

For the 4th year running, Google and O’Reilly will present a set of Open Source Awards at OSCON 2008. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2007 include Doc Searls, Jeff Waugh, Gerv Markham, Julian Seward, David Heinemeier Hansson, Karl Fogel, David Recordon, and Paul Vixie.

The nomination process is open to the entire open source community, closing May 15th, 2008. Send your nominations to osawards AT oreilly DOT com. Nominations should include the name of the recipient, any associated project/org, suggested title for the award (”Best Hacker”, “Best Community Builder”, etc.), and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O’Reilly employees cannot be nominated.

Let’s get some library products recognized!!

This is one of those common questions I get about open source - and one that was addressed in the open source tracks at Computers in Libraries. I always say that it’s no more risky than other software options - in fact I think it’s less risky - and apparently I’m not the only one:

Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the U.S. General Services Administration, said in a speech this week that the GSA heavily relies on open source to drive down costs, increase flexibility of IT dollars, and reduce risk.

…

Coleman cited some excellent reasons for deploying open-source software:

“By using open source, the agency won’t be locked in to using a proprietary software program, at least for the duration of the contract.

Not having sunk costs in a commercial software program also means the agency can move to a new program more quickly should its needs change. The general openness also means the agency could become a collaborator in the further development of the software itself.

‘You get much more transparency and interoperability, and that reduces your risk,’ she said.”

Awesome!! Read more here.

I know it’s been a while since Code4Lib, but I wanted you all to see the videos that go with my summaries. I wrote about Andrew Nagy’s presentation when I came back from Code4Lib, but now you can see the presentation your self:

Technorati Tags: vufind, code4lib, code4lib2008, code4libcon2008

Amy De Groff, Head of Library Technology Services talked to us about using open source at the Howard County Public Library. Amy started by telling us that she was not going to convince us that open source is a good thing - the other speakers had already done enough of that.

Amy’s library will be entirely open source by September - which is pretty darn awesome!! With open source software there is nothing you can’t do. That said, she reminded us that open source deployment is going to create emotional turmoil - but what change doesn’t?

Before going on, Amy warned us that she was going to talk about dirty underside of our profession and that it may cause discomfort. The truth is that as information professionals we must know it all and that it’s always been this way - and this is the wrong way to think about things.

The library profession can learn from the open source community and the open source community will benefit from the library profession’s commitment and standards of service.

People ask her how she did it - how she changed the library over to open source - her answer of “we just did” didn’t seem like enough for many librarians - but it was good enough for me! The fact is that we spend way too much time debating and meeting and discussing - and not enough time doing! Good job Amy for “just doing!”

Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil08

Kyrille Goldbeck and Dr. Godmar Back of Virginia Tech talked to us about LibX. I (probably like you) have heard of this tool before - but I had no idea how cool and powerful it was!!

LibX was originally developed as a way for patrons to take the library with them on the web as a sort of a “virtual librarian” that guides user to library resources while they use the web. LibX is a Firefox tool and an IE plugin (view screenshots and screencasts via the LibX site).

This handy tool adds a toolbar to your browser where you can search the catalog for your institution. It even lets you add additional lines for advanced searching and choose the fields you’d like to search. When you perform a search, it opens the results in a new tab/window - so that you don’t lose the page you were on. Another (seemingly simple - yet often overlooked) awesome feature is that the search terms you entered in your toolbar come down into the catalog interface so you can alter/re-run the search.

In addition to allowing catalog searches via the toolbar, LibX also integrates itself into various websites. When on Amazon.com each book page has a LibX link to the library catalog (this uses xISBN) that searches for any edition of the book you’re viewing.

You can also highlight the book title or ISBN and right click to see search options in the catalog (and LibX knows which you’re highlighting - title or ISBN and runs the right search).

Next, if you have the tool installed and you visit Barnes & Noble’s site, you’ll see that the ISBN is linked (the dashed underline means that the page has been altered by an external app). If you click that link you’ll be brought into the catalog with results for an ISBN search.

But that’s not all! LibX also searches for articles! You can choose to search Google Scholar and then on the results page the links automatically reformat to go to the library’s databases (if the articles are available) with openresolver links. This works both on and off campus. If you’re off campus, you can reload the page using EZproxy and access the resources from home.

And as if that isn’t enough!! We’re always told to check the references in the articles we’re reading - well LibX makes this super easy! You just open up the PDF file and drag a reference onto the Google Scholar button on the toolbar. A new tab will open with the results!!

How is it that I went through library school without realizing how handy this tool was???

If you’re wondering how you can get this for your institution, it’s actually pretty easy!

Originally, institutions had to contact Virginia Tech to ask them to create the toolbar for them - but now you can use LibX Editions and create your own toolbar in minutes. Keep in mind that some manual customization will be required to make this toolbar meet your library’s needs.

That said, Editions has had a great impact on the usage of LibX. This tool allows anyone to build a LibX edition, share it, copy it, modify it and distribute it. All in the spirit of open source!

Conclusions

I wish I was still in school so I could use this tool all of the time - for now I’ll have to settle for using it when researching blog posts

Technorati Tags: cil2008, cil08, libx