If you’re a new developer that wants to obtain more in-depth knowledge of Evergreen, this is a great place to start:

Dan Scott held an Evergreen Developer Workshop at FSOSS 2009 in Toronto, Canada.  Robert Soulliere from Mohawk College has uploaded videos of the workshop to Archive.org, splitting the talk into 9 segments. Dan has also put his workshop materials online. There’s an HTML versionwith written details and, for the extra keen, there’s a also a tarball that contains the HTML version plus the code used in the examples and Dan’s slides.

This info courtesy of the Evergreen Newsletter which is sent out to subscribers of the Evergreen general discussion list, development list.  It is also available on the Evergreen blog.

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.

I recently read The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. While it wasn’t the best book ever written, it did have a few interesting snippets that I thought I’d share. The premise of the book, and the writing style, is captured in this statement:

This book is particularly concerned with the superficially plausible idea…that information and its technologies can unproblematically replace the nuanced relations between people.”

The authors argue that we, as a society, are obsessed with information to the point that we are ignoring the underlying social relationships that connect people. They call it “information fetishism” and relate it to the “commodity fetishism” of Marx’s day.

My favorite part of the book was the Preface where I found several good nuggets. The following excerpt provides a useful context for our current struggles with copyright, digital publishing, blogging and journalism:

…it is well worth remembering that the early days of printing produced an overwhelming profusion of junk. Reputation and reliability in books did not come automatically. Authors, printers, and booksellers fought — sometimes among themselves, sometimes jointly — to create ideas of coherence, credibility, and authority for growing, diverging, and increasingly sophisticated reading publics. The printing revolution, in short, involved social organization, legal innovation, and the institutional creativity to develop what appears now as the simple book and the self-evident information it contains. Contrary to assumptions that all it takes is technological innovation, a digital revolution too will need similar nontechnological innovations to fulfill its potential.

Later in the book, the authors address the role of newspapers. They point out that the death of newspapers has been predicted at various times and yet the presses keep on humming along. Newspapers, they quote Alexis de Tocqueville as saying, maintain civilization by placing the same ideas into the minds of thousands of people at once. They create a common activity. They also quote Dutch historian Johan Huizinga who says that Americans become aware of their spiritual unity through the newspapers. After a trip to the U.S., Huizinga said:

The millions, as they do their careless reading every day at breakfast, in the subway, on the train and the elevated, are performing…a ritual. The mirror of their culture is held up to them in their newspapers.

This last bit is interesting because I’m also reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong which talks about the development of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In this book, the theme of communal unity comes up frequently. In her book, it isn’t newspapers that bind people together, it is monotheistic religions. Believing in a single God helps ease the problems associated with tribal or clan rivalries. Not sure where I’m going with this but thought it was an interesting juxtaposition: God and the daily newspaper as unifiers.

One chapter from The Social Life of Information made me think of Infopeople and understand some of the reasons why Infopeople workshops have been so successful. In “Learning – in Theory and in Practice,” the authors talk about learning about versus learning to be, or put another way know that versus know how. In other words, there are two dimensions of knowledge. One needs information, but one also needs to know how to put that information to use. One learns how to put the knowledge to use by practice. The authors state that “unenlightened teaching” isolates people from the ongoing practice of work itself and focuses too much on information.

Infopeople is primarily a training organization. Librarians train librarians. One of the strengths of Infopeople workshops is the emphasis on implicit (practioner) knowledge (aka know how), contributed by all the people in class practicing librarianship, in combination with the sharing of explicit knowledge (know that) that is presented by the workshop instructor. In taking an Infopeople workshop, the attendees are becoming a member of a community of practice and shaping their identity as members of that community in the process. Workshop attendees don’t simply ingest information, they absorb information in context, learn the practice of librarianship and build upon their identity as librarians.

One final note about the book. Ironically, it was written before the proliferation of social networking websites like myspace.com and the popularization of phenomena like tagging and data mining. I’d like to see a short article by these two authors on what they make of these latest developments. It seems to me that the social life of the information age is just now starting to develop. One of our jobs as information professionals is to ensure that information serves people. How we organize, manage, manipulate, display and interact with information becomes more critical as the amount of available information continues to explode. Perhaps a good title for the sequel to this book would be The Social Mandate of Information.

Hooray for a San Jose State Library School for dumping the CE Papers.

The semester after I will complete my schooling (August 2006), they are inaugurating a new system for the culminating experience (CE). Instead of having a choice of the CE Papers (responding to two questions [from a predefined field of 12 or so] in the form of a 20-page research paper) OR writing a thesis, students will now have the option of writing a thesis OR preparing an e-portfolio.

The e-portfolio must present evidence of competency in the following areas:

1. articulate the ethics, values and foundational principles of library and information professionals and their role in the promotion of intellectual freedom;
2. compare the environments and organizational settings in which library and information professionals practice;
3. recognize the social, cultural and economic dimensions of information use;
4. apply the fundamental principles of planning, management and marketing/advocacy;
5. design, query and evaluate information retrieval systems;
6. use the basic concepts and principles related to the creation, evaluation, selection, acquisition, preservation and organization of specific items or collections of information;
7. understand the system of standards and methods used to control and create information structures and apply basic principles involved in the organization and representation of knowledge;
8. demonstrate proficiency in the use of current information and communication technologies, and other related technologies, as they affect the resources and uses of libraries and other types of information providing entities;
9. use service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate information access, relevance, and accuracy for individuals or groups of users;
10. describe the fundamental concepts of information-seeking behaviors;
11. design training programs based on appropriate learning principles and theories;
12. understand the nature of research, research methods and research findings; retrieve, evaluate and synthesize scholarly and professional literature for informed decision-making by specific client groups;
13. demonstrate oral and written communication skills necessary for group work, collaborations and professional level presentations; and
14. evaluate programs and services on specified criteria.

The e-portfolio can be composed of a combination of formats: articles, discussion posts, research summaries, videos, presentation slides, reports from conferences or seminars, etc. In other words, it is relatively format-agnostic (someone has been reading about GenX).

The CE papers were so much like high school term papers that I ended up a bit sorry that I hadn’t taken on a thesis. These two choices (thesis or e-portfolio) make much more sense for someone graduating with a Master’s Degree.

Kudos to Ken Haycock, the new SLIS Program Director, for making this change (among many other good changes in the program). Go Ken!