I have been very busy writing and posting blog entries but alas, the content is all living elsewhere. Much of what I write is for clients and these reports sometimes find their way to this site. But not always. For now, take a peek at a new website I’m working on with King County Library System and the other rascals involved in moving libraries to open source library systems.

The website is http://rscel.org and it is for the Resource and Sharing Cooperative of Evergreen Libraries. Its just getting going and the effort is largely funded by a three year grant from the IMLS. You just may want to get yourself involved….

(PPT and handouts)

From a session at the 2009 Califa Vendor Fair on the Open Source – Open Libraries Consortium.  There was no formal presentation.  Instead, attendees were asked to choose the topics to be addressed in the short session.  PPT slides were used to help answer those questions.  Handouts that were available are included as the last three pages of the attached PDF.

YouChooseSlide

Attendees Chose The Topic to be Addressed from this Slide

The OLE Final Report is out and it begins with a “research scenario” that OLE is striving to support.  In other words, the library software they are planning to develop (in the next phase which is code named the Kuali OLE Project) could make the following scenario a reality…

An economist is conducting research on the housing market financial collapse. She needs raw economic data as well as secondary data, policy documents, and a host of other materials available in print and electronic form. Her campus uses OLE, which manages all campus collections and information-resource subscriptions and is also integrated into the campus learning management system (LMS), the accounting, human resources and student systems, and other major technology systems—as well as several consortia to which the library or the campus belongs, such as OCLC and the Hathi Trust.

Moving toward a draft document, she transfers materials into a word processor. Thanks to OLE, each arrives with full bibliographic metadata attached and ready to auto-format (via tools such as Zotero) into a form suitable for the academic journal she is targeting. When she is ready to share, she stores a copy of the draft in her institutional repository (via an OLE-aware interface) and sends a link to her various academic (social) networking venues, to invite public comment.

In Mark Leggott’s lengthy response to Stephen Abram’s article, he challenges many of Abram’s claims and does so from his own  relevant experience:  Leggott is from the University of Prince Edward Island which migrated off SirsiDynix Unicorn to Evergreen.

The following four issues (fears) often come up for people when they first start looking into an OSLS (open source library system):

1. Total Cost of Ownership (Don’t  OSLS products really cost more by the time you hire the staff you need to run them?)
2. Features (I understand OSLS products don’t have all the features of a mature ILS product.)
3. User Friendliness (An open source system will be too hard for our customers to use.)
4. Difficult to Deploy (There’s no way our staff could install and implement an open source ILS on their own!)

The following four excerpts address these issues very effectively.   I hope you’ll read the entire Leggott article but in case you don’t, at least read these excerpts!

Abram: The open source proponents state that it has a much lower price and a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What they tend to leave out, however, are the entry costs of switching systems.

Leggott:  Open source does (in my experience) have a much lower TCO. As one example, UPEI moved from the SD Unicorn ILS to Evergreen in just over 2 months, including buying new hardware, hiring a contractor and acquiring a 1-year Equinox platinum support agreement for LESS than what we paid for a year’s maintenance for Unicorn. With what was left over we paid developers to add some functionality to Evergreen, some of which found its way back to the project. That kind of giving back to the community feature of open source is hard to assign a value to, but it is many times greater than the effort you typically put into a closed proprietary system, further enhancing the TCO of open source.

<…>

Abram: Generally, the available open source ILS platforms have less than half of the features and functions of any SirsiDynix ILS.

Leggott: The great benefit of open source products is that they are part of a rich and vibrant ecosystem where you are free to mix and match products to suit your local needs. While the current Evergreen does not have the same full functionality as the flavour-of-the-month-SD ILS (e.g. no serials management), UPEI was able to construct a BETTER for us ILS ecosystem by using the CUFTS open source system to manage all our serials – print and digital. This would be a challenge, or downright impossible, with a system like Unicorn. The Library community does not need more closed ILS systems, we need more OLAFs – Open Library Applications Frameworks. A better way to make this statement would be “The available open source ILS frameworks will always have more features and functions than any SD ILS.”

<…>

Abram:  Proprietary software is much more user-friendly.

Leggott:  Hmmm. One of the most interesting outcomes of our switch from Unicorn to Evergreen was the comments our student assistants made when they came back from summer break and discovered a new ILS: This software is a lot easier to use. Our staff training with Evergreen also took a fraction of the time it did with the switch to Unicorn.

<…>

Abram: Is open source harder to deploy?

Leggott:  No. Our implementation of Evergreen took a fraction of the time that Unicorn did at UPEI. Also, because we are proactively investing staff time and money in more useful open source/LAMP type skills, our staff can easily install most open source software stacks, giving us a great deal of flexibility. At UPEI all our current software applications (with the exception of RefWorks and desktop OS) are open source. We also have created a world-class open source framework called Islandora, all with a full-time staff complement of 26 and a systems staff of 4. Encouraging a staff to be fluent with open source tools and philosophies is the best way to transform your library.

There’s been a lot of chatter in libraryland and now even in the open source community outside of libraryland about a SirsiDynix article written by Stephen Abram. The article had been released over the last few months to a few select SirsiDynix customers but was leaked around Halloween. This is appropriate because the point of the article seemed to be to scare their customers into compliance.

The history of the article, the article itself and links to many excellent retorts have been aggregated on this Code4Lib wiki page.

via Open Source – Open Libraries

“BibLibre wants to push libraries who call us to do development work, for Koha or any other piece of software, to write in the RFP itself or the contract that all the code produced will both: have an open source license; and be accessible on a public repository.”

via Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS | BibLibre

Dan Scott is offering an Evergreen Developer Basics Workshop at the Free Software Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) being held in Toronto on October 29th, 2009.

Here’s the workshop description:

Over the past year, Evergreen has been adopted by a number of libraries in Ontario. While it is built on a flexible, scalable architecture and offers an impressive set of features, the Evergreen community needs a broader base of developers who are able to contribute to the base functionality and create customized Evergreen instances. This workshop will provide developers with the tools they need to contribute to the Evergreen project and better serve their libraries, tackling subjects such as creating a new OpenSRF service, accessing data with permission-based methods, customizing the database schema and IDL, and building AJAX interfaces with the OpenILS Dojo widgets.

via Evergreen Developer Basics Workshop at FSOSS 2009 – Coffee|Code : Dan Scott.

kcsl.org

2009-current. Assisting KCLS in implementation of IMLS grant entitled Empowered By Open Source. The goal of the project is “create and develop the critical infrastructure components that have traditionally been provided by ILS vendors and establish a peer-to-peer support model for open source libraries.”

If you are trying to make sense of what is going on with Liblime and Koha.  This is the article for you (by Kathryn Greenhill at her blog Libraries Matter Librarians Matter):

The Koha fork and being the change you want to see

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

via The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community « Equinox Blog.