2008

Building and supporting Koha

Building and Support Koha, an open-source ILS Saturday June 28th, 2008, 10:30-12:00 Hyatt Regency Orange County John Houser, Senior Technology Consultant for PALINET, and Johsua Ferraro, CEO of Liblime, set out to answer common questions about open-source ILS systems with a focus on Liblime’s support for Koha. The format was an interview, and the resulting questions and answers were recorded. Watch for a link to the podcast version here. Representative questions and answers follow, but these are only samples of an extremely rich discussion of general and very specific technical details. Cost Don’t necessarily plan to save lots of money on an open-source ILS, as planning to contribute to development efforts has many advantages–primarily that you get to set the priorities for new features in the ILS. A representative of a Koha library in the audience pointedly disagreed, stressing that in his case there were significant cost savings. How does…

2008

Open Source Legal Issues

Monday, June 30th, 2008 Hyatt Regency Orange County Walt Scacchi of UC-Irvine stepped in as a last-minute replacement speaker for Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center and gave a talk entitled “Research Results for Free/Open Source Software Development: Best Practices for Libraries? (and some legal issues too)” based on his empirical research on open-source project processes, practices, and community development . The talk was rich in details on who open-source developers are and what they do. Using the current stats at Sourceforge as a starting point, he estimated approximately 180,000 current open-source software projects, of which approximately 18,000 (10%) are currently being succesfully developed. The largest area of open-source development is in games, in large part driven by the fact that the very successful Sony game systems are built using open-source software. Open-source developers tend to use the tools they build, which is not necessarily the case for…

2008

Open Source Open Services – Emerging Technology Interest Group

Joe Ford convened the Emerging Technology Interest group managed discussion on “Open Source, Open Services” Darrell Gunter began by discussing Collexis research projects and applications for libraries. Fascinating work is being undertaken on computationally derived ontology, what Collexis refers to as Fingerprinting. [Bibliographic ontology (like FRBR or FRAD not getting any play in the semantic portion of the presentation). ] Screenshots of tools (presentation slides to be posted to the LITA wiki) included the Knowledge Dashboard, which is being used for Hypothesis Generation by scientists. Biomedexperts.com discussed as a Collexis partner with tools for researchers including expert visualization, social network graphs of who is publishing with whom. Asklepios Group discussed as a user of collexis tools which utilizes mobile technology for patient-side consultation and comparison of relevant treatments. I would characterize Collexis methodology as relying on computationally derived indexing for data visualization (btw-the intellectual foundations of LIS exist (partly) in…

2008

Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim

We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal ‘Birds of a Feather’. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers’ room — just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we’ll get even)! (We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.) First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chan as co-chair. The name for the IG is ‘Drupal4Lib’ and our purpose is “to promote the use and understanding of the content management system, Drupal, by libraries and librarians”. Next on the agenda was the true meat-and-potatoes of the BoF: shooting the breeze about Drupal and demonstrating a…

2008

Top Technology Trends from Sarah Houghton-Jan, ALA 2008

I had a lovely time presenting virtually, despite the sound issues on all ends. It still was a rather successful demonstration of virtual participation, and I think that was wonderful. Big thanks to Maurice York for organizing this for myself and Karen. I have 5 Trends I’d like to throw out there. I was able to cover three of them (#s 1-3) in the live presentation, but apparently the echo in the room made parts of what I said difficult to hear. So, here’s what I said verbatim, near as I can remember (plus the bonuses of #s 4 and 5). Let’s hit it. #1: Bandwidth Every library complains about bandwidth. Many people have faster access at home than at the library, which is a reversal of what we used to see when people came into the library to use our connections. The problem is multimedia, which is wonderful, but…

2008

LITA Public Libraries Technology Interest Group Meeting

The PLTIG business meeting focused on further developing our program idea for Annual 2009. The program looks at how various libraries and consortia have used technology to bring their summer reading programs “online”–from patron front-ends to backends for creating statistical and tracking reports. (How many repeat customers did your summer reading program have this year?) Discussion focused on speaker selection, developing guidelines for speakers, preparing a resource list for attendees, and publicity options. The group also discussed plans for Midwinter. Instead of hosting a managed discussion as we have done in the past, we decided simply to hold a business meeting. We’ll work further on the 2009 program at Midwinter as well as begin the process of planning for Annual 2010. As part of the Midwinter discussion, we also touched on the perennial topic of “what’s the purpose of this IG?” We concluded that our purpose was to provide programming…

2008

Live Streaming from ALA Annual 2008

This is not an organized LITA endeavor, but as a proof-of-concept for BIGWIG, I am going to be streaming as much as I can from ALA Annual 2008. The service I’m using for this is called Ustream, and the live channel can be found here: http://www.ustream.tv/griffey Because of the vagaries of internet access at the various convention hotels, it remains to be seen exactly what I will be able to do…but I’m going to give it a try! Even if you miss the live stream, all of the videos will be at the above URL to peruse at your leisure. If you are interested in trying to catch me live, I’ll be announcing it over on Twitter.

2008

Electronic Resources Management IG Meeting in Anaheim

Please join us at the Electronic Resources Management Interest Group (ALCTS/LITA) meeting otherwise known as the “Friday Night Meeting”. When: Friday, June 27th 6:30-8:00pm Where: Anaheim Convention Center Room 203 A Agenda: 1. IG Business (5 Minutes) 2. SUSHI- Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Open Forum – Adam Chandler and friends. Adam will be presenting the results of a SUSHI survey he is conducting of COUNTER members and then using that as a lead-off for a discussion about what the challenges and opportunities related to SUSHI implementation are. (30 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi 3. CORE-Cost of Resources Exchange update – Ted Koppel and/or Jeff Aipperspach (15-20 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/core 4. KBART-Knowledge Base and Related Tools Working Group – Nettie Lagace (15-20 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart 5. Update report on the ONIX family (Licensing Terms, Books and Serials) – Brian Green (5-10 minutes) http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html 6. NISO Update – Todd Carpenter (10-15 minutes) http://www.niso.org We look…