How adorable is this?

Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up.

Qimo’s interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.

I would love to see this on the children’s stations in public libraries and schools!! In fact I’m going to add it to my open source talks for school librarians.

Found via DownloadSquad.

When I teach my open source course I always talk about our current financial situation (here and around the world). While not all open source alternatives are free or cost saving, some are obviously a smart move. Mostly I talk about getting rid of Microsoft Windows and Office - and their obscene license fees - and replacing them with Ubuntu and Openoffice. It seems like the French Gendarmerie Nationale police force agrees with me and have saved significant amounts of money making this very move:

By switching to open source software, such as the Ubuntu operating system and OpenOffice instead of Windows and Microsoft Office, the force has saved roughly €50 million since 2004. The best quote comes from Lt. Colonel Xavier Guimard: “Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” he said. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.” But what about those sweet, sweet icons? No matter, the department says its budget dropped by 70 percent by switching to open source, and it’s obviously an approach they’d like to continue in the future. The entire organization should be running on Linux by 2015.

Found via GearCrave and Ars Technica.

I have to admit, I have never used Jaiku - Twitter is enough for me - but this news from DownloadSquad peeks my interest:

Google has released the source code for micro-blogging service Jaiku. The company announced earlier this year that it would cease development of Jaiku. But instead of shutting Jaiku down altogether, Google has moved the project so that it now runs on Google App Engine.

Meanwhile, now that JaikuEngine is available to the public, anyone can set up their own version of Jaiku. And developers can help contribute to the project. It should be interesting to see how the project fares. While Twitter certainly dominates the micro-blogging space, it’s possible that the new open source nature of Jaiku will make it attractive to open source enthusiasts.

If you do something neat with this new open source micro-blogging platform, let me know I’m curious to see where this goes.

I’m with Sam Dean who writes about newspaper online editions using open source alternatives for their content management systems.

Hard economic times are creating new financial realities for newspapers. Just this past week, the Seattle Post Intelligencier produced its final print edition, after more than a century of publishing. Today’s open source content management systems are intuitive, very powerful, can help publish content in many languages, and if support is needed, players such as Acquia, with its commercial support for Drupal, offer flexibility.

Nobody at OStatic has ever needed outside support for Drupal, which we run on, and many other sites, such as Fast Company and The Onion, do fine with Drupal. (We’ve provided many free Drupal resources here.) It’s hardly the only open source content management choice, though. For newspapers and other people considering an open source content management platform, OpenSourceCMS remains an excellent way to take the reins of several different free CMS systems. The site allows you to try Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and many other platforms, and you can spend hours functioning as site administrator, watching video tutorials and more.

There is an open source application for every purpose (well maybe not yet - but every day I learn of something new).

Today, a Silicon Valley non-profit group called InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters) unveiled three new open source software tools targeted to help global humanitarian efforts. The group works with humanitarian organizations, local communities, and government ministries to improve disease detection and disaster response. Some of the tools are already in use in HIV clinics in Tanzania, centers for disease control in Kenya and Cambodia, and more.

These three apps are:

• InSTEDD GeoChat

• InSTEDD Mesh4X
• InSTEDD Evolve

Learn more.

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

Looks like I had the featured SLA CE class earlier this month If you’ll be at SLA this year, make sure you register for my class to learn how you can use open source software in your library.

Featured CE Course: Practical Open Source Software for Libraries and Librarians
 

Date: Sunday, 14 June 2009
Time: 8:00 am - 12:00 pm
Instructor: Nicole Engard, Open Source Evangelist, LibLime

Listen to podcast & check out SLA’s other excellent courses.

Technorati Tags: sla2009, open source

Awesome news from Biblibre (quote from email sent to Koha developers):

I’m very pleased to announce that BibLibre has started working on a SOPAC connector for Koha.

SOPAC is a module of drupal, written to have a perfectly integrated web2.0 catalogue over the CMS drupal. You can find information here : http://www.thesocialopac.net/

It’s a new Biblibrian that works on that : jean-andré Santoni. He’s still a student, working on this subject for 2 months. Hopefully, once he has finished his school, he will be hired by BibLibre.

He will implement many new webservices, that will follow the DLF Discovery Interface scheme (http://diglib.org/architectures/ilsdi/)

He started last week, and the 1st days are very encouraging. We will let you know once it can be opened.

As usual, it will be GPL-ed, even if we still haven’t decided how to distribute the code (use koha, sopac or BibLibre tools & repositories ?)

happy day.
–
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l’info-doc

I love seeing open source products brought together to work in conjunction I can’t wait to see what these developments reveal!

Technorati Tags: koha, drupal, sopac

It has been a bit over a year since I have joined LibLime and I have learned a lot in that time. One of the things I’ve learned is just how different libraries around the world are! As an active member on the Koha mailing list, I see lots of questions that I sometimes just don’t understand. Questions about the handling of items or collection or vendor codes - things that I know how to use in a US academic (where I have my experience) or public (where I do a lot of training) library - but have never used outside of the country.

This is why Joann Ransom’s recent questions to the list about terminology and codes in Koha was so interesting for me to read and respond to. After going through my responses, Joann wanted to share her findings with everyone (another awesome part of open source - sharing) on her blog.

There are two very different ways to organize a collection in Koha 3.0. Either heavy use of the Item Types OR heavy use of CCodes. My understanding is that you have to choose 1 or the other for advanced search, but not both.

Item types – These are used to set circulation policies. These are not format descriptors (GMDs). They can be set as advanced search options, and display as icons on the search results screen. The codes are never seen by the public, but informative descriptions add real value as a finding tool for patrons.

CCodes – Collection Codes can be set as advanced search options too, and can be set to display as text on search results.

For those who are new to Koha or are switching from an older version, Joann’s post might be a helpful read before getting started with setting up your collections and items

Everyone who knows Koha knows Owen and his amazing design work on Koha. Now we can all learn from his experiences by keeping up with his new Koha Blog. The first two posts help you update the header on Koha! I can’t wait to see what else he’s going to teach us.