What’s your full name (middle name too)?

Cecelia Jacqueline Wolfrom

What is your official Job Title?

Customer Support Specialist

Did you (or do you) have a nickname?

Cookie (I’ve not been called Cecelia since grade school)

What’s your favorite color?

Teal

What’s your favorite food or meal?

Fresh Maine lobster

What’s your favorite word (keep it clean)?

Peachy, as in “that’s just ‘peachy!”

Are you a dog or a cat person?

At this time in my life I’m a cat person. They require a lot less work than dogs.

Do you have any pets?

I’ve recently adopted a beautiful long hair black and white kitty named Lexi who is the new ‘love of my life’.

Why did you want to work with LibLime?

When I learned that LibLime offered a hosted solution for Koha it made me realize that it would now be possible for libraries without the technical skills to set Koha up on their own, to move to an Open Source ILS. Along the way, I became so impressed with LibLime, that I decided I wanted to work with them.

What did you know about open source before taking on this job? What have you learned since taking the job?

I’d done a lot of research on the open source concept and spent about 3 years traveling to different library conferences talking to groups about the benefits of Open Source - from operating systems, word processing, web page development, and through to an ILS system.

I’ve learned and been amazed at just how quickly enhancements, bug fixes, etc. can occur in the open source environment. This is great for the users, but it certainly requires me to stay sharp to make sure I don’t miss anything! (I’m having the time of my life doing it though, I know it helps keep me young!)

What’s at the top of your wishlist for the next version of Koha?

I’m too busy keeping up with all the improvements in each latest version that I’ll leave that wish list to the librarians who are out there using it on a daily basis.

If you had all of the skills, time and money, what open source application would you like to develop?

A way for people to help people one-on-one around the world - to be nicer to the planet and each other - so many resources and too little time to search site by site.

What are your top three favorite websites?

• http://greeningyourlibrary.wordpress.com/
• http://www.fsf.org/
• http://www.plinkit.org/

What would you do if you won the lottery?

Help both my daughters pay off their homes, as well as set up a tidy college fund for my young grandson. For me, I’d love to do some traveling abroad and maybe buy a newer home. I then would take whatever was left to help find the small niches that don’t usually get funding for projects for one reason or another and help them.

Are you an organized desk person or a messy desk person?

I start each day as an organized desk person but can’t say that always carry through each day, so mostly yes, but sometimes ‘no’

Anything else you want our readers to know about you?

My first job ( college internship) was working for UNIVAC, a division of Sperry Rand Corporation in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. If you’d like to see a little history of the computer industry, you might find this Wikipedia link interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I - we’ve sure come a long way since then…….

I’m with Matt Asay when he asks and answers:

Has open source come to include so much that it’s somewhat meaningless? If so, should we return to the free-software roots that defined its infancy?

Personally, I think the bigger the tent, the better it is for open source. Even a tent that includes a wide array of open-source leeches, an issue taken up by Bill Snyder in InfoWorld.

I like the big tent (and even, increasingly, the “leeches”) because the broadening is largely driven by the same motivation: finding ways to feed one’s family by writing more open-source software.

That, after all, is really the reason for the term “open source” in the first place: make it more relevant so more people could create sustainable businesses around it.

Purists might think that open source should be applied to an elite few (and I do hate that Microsoft can now be used in the same sentence as open source) but the fact of the matter is, the more people promoting, using and selling open source the better it is for open source.

We live in a time when people expect openness and the ability to participate in development, so why not build the biggest tent ever for open source?

Did you know that Koha is all over the social interwebs? If you haven’t seen them, check out these pages:

• Twitter
• KohaILS
• #Koha
• Koha TweetKnot
• Koha Hashtag
• Facebook
• Official Page
• KUDOS
• LinkedIn
• Koha
• KUDOS
• SlideShare
• Yahoo! Pipe
• Koha Planet

For those of you who read this blog through an aggregator, you may not have noticed that I have my recent open source bookmarks on the right hand column of the page. Since I have found so many awesome resources (mostly today) I thought I might want to share them in a post. These are in order of bookmark - I have no preference based on the ordering below.

• All for Good
  Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application that allows you to find and share volunteer activities.
• VirtualBox
  VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
• Fluid Project Wiki
  An open, collaborative project to improve the user experience of community source software.
• Fluid Engage
  Fluid Engage is a new project that will create an open source community that will provide curators and educators within museums and galleries the necessary supports, tools and resources
• MacLibre | Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X
  MacLibre is an Open Source Software Distribution for Mac OS X. It’s simple, intuitive with applications you need. It brings a new way of software installation on your Mac.
• Three Open Source E-book Readers Worth a Look
• Over 40 Free, Must-Have Open Source Resources
• The EveryBlock source code
  EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a “microlocal” level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site’s backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code.
• Teaching Open Source
  This is a neutral collaboration point for professors, institutions, communities, and companies to come together and make the teaching of Open Source a global success.
• Melody: Community Powered Publishing
  Melody is an open source content management system for bloggers and publishers where its community of users and contributors is its most important feature.
• 40 Mac Freewares and Open Source Software for Web Designers | Desizn Tech
• Sugar on a Stick - Sugar Labs
  A “Linux-based learning environment” that boots from a USB drive and is designed for children’s ease of use.
• Free / Open Source Research Community (Home)
  In the spirit of free and open source software (F/OSS), we are attempting to establish a community in which information will be freely exchanged, so that we may further the understanding of open source and its implications outside the realm of software development.
• SemperTool
  SemperTool introduces the first open source product: Subscription Management Database - SMDB. SMDB is an Electronic Resource Management system - ERM.
• ILS Survey: Open Source vs. Proprietary
  This survey was conducted from October 30, 2007 to January 3, 2008. It was answered by libraries using the open source ILSs Koha (n=113) and Evergreen (n=119), and proprietary ILSs (n=129). The current version of Koha was 2.2.9 and Evergreen was 1.2.
• Mac4Lin
  The goal of this project is to bring the Mac OS X user interface to POSIX Operating Systems (GNU/LInux, FreeBSD, openSolaris etc.).
• Freeciv
  Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization.
• Lupo PenSuite
  The Suite includes over 200 highly selected portable programs and games (7-Zip, Audacity, CCleaner, eMule, FileZilla, Firefox, Foxit Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Miranda, Notepad++, Opera, Thunderbird, µTorrent, VLC and many more). Over 5 million users have downloaded it.
• LiberKey
  LiberKey installed on your USB key (or mini external hard drive, a music player such as iPod…) can be connected on any PC. Immediately you have under hand all your familiar tools, without any installation on the host PC.
• Open Source – Open Libraries
  Open Source – Open Libraries is a consortia of libraries, library systems, and other organizations committed to pursuing Open Source Software (OSS) alternatives for libraries.
• OmCollab
  omCollab is a powerful, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration product completely built on open source software. It provides a web portal environment to create, share and search Microsoft Office content, files, shared bookmarks, blog posts and wiki articles across the enterprise. omCollab integrates some of the most powerful open source software applications into a single collaborative environment. It enables organisations to drive innovation, collaboration and community building.
• Inkscape
  An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
• Library a la Carte
  Librarians have enough to do and maintaining static HTML pages is tedious and time-consuming. The Library à la Carte tool enables librarians to easily and quickly create dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, such as chat and RSS feeds, with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases.
• LibData Project Site
  LibData is a library oriented web based application which provides authoring environments for subject pathfinders (Research QuickStart), course related pages (CourseLib) and general purpose web pages (PageScribe).
• Senayan
  Senayan is an open source Library Management System. It is build on Open source technology like PHP and MySQL. Senayan provides many features such as Bibliography database, Circulation, Membership and many more that will help “automating” library tasks.
• LimeSurvey.org
  The Leading Open Source Survey Tool
• Weminaria
  Open source screen recording software, free video capture, video recorder, capture tool, desktop recorder, software tutorial, create software demo
• EmeraldView
  EmeraldView is a lightweight front-end for the digital library software Greenstone.
• Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows
  Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!
• AmpliFeeder
  Open source lifestream platform

WOW! Joomla has reached 10 million downloads!

The Joomla Project is excited to celebrate a remarkable benchmark in the world of open source—our 10 millionth download.

As one of the most powerful publishing platforms available, Joomla has grown exponentially since it’s first release in 2005, which was downloaded just over 72,000 times from JoomlaCode. That meteoric rise in less than four years is a solid statement by the Joomla Community about how the project changes lives all over the world.

With Joomla 1.6 on the horizon, that same community is energized and excited for what the future holds. Development is underway on the next generation content management system, which will enable you, our faithful users, to achieve new heights and hopefully accomplish another 10 million downloads. 

This is a amazing!! Congrats to Joomla!

Ian Walls twittered the Coming Soon talk at the LibLime booth at ALA (read from the bottom up):

• Library calendar doesn’t have iCal import/export as part of the request, but should be straight forward.
• All this in next few weeks, though Acq will take a little longer. Should be in 3.2, provided that customers paying for it sign off.
• Other stuff: fine thresholds, offline circ, patron proxies, serial display, granular permissions, sydentics integration
• MFHD import/export, but not stored that way. Fine by me, so long as it maps.
• Not hooked into serials checkin yet, but will be. Good for multi-volumes. Multiple summaries per bib. Free-text add or MFHD.
• Ooooh, now summary records! A way to group items together that don’t necessarily have item records. Not required at all
• New notifications can have defaults per patron type.
• New notifications: patrons pick which to receive and how. SMS is possible.
• Term loans: transact between two dates, have static due date regardless.
• And, of course, the much-anticipated hour-based loan rules! Minute option, too. Library calendar has support for this, too.
• On to new Circ features: policies matrix info pulled out into applicable fines/circ rules. Neat; increases reusability.
• Action buttons will have associated privilege flags. Not Gears, but similar interface tech (XJS).
• Lots of stuff still forthcoming, includig search and UI enhancements.
• Has send feature to mail letter, email or send EDI file. Encumbers on click.
• Very interesting. Looks like biblios (Gears?) and has more fields than the #koha 3.0.3 install I have. Shiny.
• At LibLime’s demo of what’s Coming Soon to #koha. First off: GetIt acquisitions

The biggest worry about going open source is the lack of documentation. While I say there is no worry about this with Koha, it is a problem with some small open source projects. This is why LiveTechDocs is offering a free lifetime subscription to open source projects!!

LiveTechDocs is an online collaboration service for XML documentation review. It’s simple, secure, and satisfying!

I haven’t tried it out because I have the documentation for Koha on Plone - but I’d love to hear about other experiences with this tool.

I’m sure that someone in the KUDOS meeting at ALA today took notes, but for now, here is a twitter summary:

Are you reading the Koha Blog by Owen Leonard? If not - why the heck not?? Owen has been posting awesome tutorials to help you with styling your Koha installation complete with code and screenshots - just the way I like to learn. Check out the most recent additions:

• Colorizing the Cart and Lists buttons
• Grabbing eyes with styled messages boxes

I am working on some very very broad research on open source use in libraries for a book I’m working on. The focus of the book will be on software you can use that is open source. If you have a chance to answer this brief survey to help me out that would be greatly appreciated:

http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=63946&lang=en

In sticking with the open source theme, I used LimeSurvey (an open source survey management tool) - check it out!!

Feel free to link here or repost this announcement all over libraryland.