Open Libraries “… are signs of life and hope: They are the cornerstone of democracy”

Taiga 2 Forum moves into Open Space

Assistant University Librarians and Assistant Directors met for the second annual Taiga Forum a day before ALA Midwinter, Seattle, to discuss the changing dynamics of academic libraries.

In a change from last year, the participants utilized the Open Spaces structure to stage an unconference, where the conversation topics were chosen by the participants.

Topics included Search, Radical Collaboration, and Google: Friend or Foe, among others. The guiding principles were, “Whoever comes is the right person, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, whenever it starts is the right time, and when it’s over, it’s over.” The Endangered Species conference met in an adjoining conference room.

Meg Bellinger, Yale University Associate University Librarian, said, “We came away with the sense that we don’t have all of the answers but we all share the same problems. We must spend time moving beyond the current issues towards solutions.”

The meeting was sponsored by Innovative Interfaces, Inc.

Open source metasearch

Now there’s a new kid on the (meta)search block. LibraryFind, an open-source project funded by the State Library of Oregon, is currently live at Oregon State University. The library has just packaged up a release for anyone to download and install.

Jeremy Frumkin, Gray chair for Innovative Library Services at OSU, said the goals were to contribute to the support of scholarly workflow, remove barriers between the library and Web information, and to establish the digital library as platform.

Lead developers Dan Chudnov, soon to join the Library of Congress’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, and Terry Reese, catalog librarian and developer of popular application MarcEdit, worked with the following guiding principles: Two clicks–one to find, and one to get; a goal of getting results in four seconds, and known and adjustable results ranking.

Other OSU project members included Tami Herlocker, point person for interface development, and Ryan Ordway, system administrator. Frumkin said, “The Ruby on Rails platform provided easy, quick user interface development. It gives a variety of UI possibilities, and offers new interfaces for different user groups.”

The application includes collaborations on the OpenURL module from Ross Singer, library applications developer at the Georgia Tech library, and Ed Summers, Library of Congress developer. Journal coverage can be imported from a SerialsSolutions export, and more import facilities are planned in upcoming releases.

OSU is working on a contract with OCLC’s WorldCat to download data, and is looking to build greater trust relationships with vendors. “The upside for vendors is they can see how their data is used when developing new services,” Frumkin said.

Future enhancements include an information dashboard and a personal digital library. Developers are also staffing a support chatroom for technical support, help, and development discussion of LibraryFind.