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

Casey Bisson named one of first winners of Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration

Casey Bisson, information architect at Plymouth State University, was presented with a $50,000 Mellon award for Technology Collaboration by Tim Berners-Lee at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Washington DC December 4.

His project, WP-OPAC, is seen as the first step for allowing library catalogs to integrate with WordPress, a popular open-source content management system.

The awards committee included Mitchell Baker, Mozilla; Tim Berners-Lee,W3; Vinton Cerf, Google; Ira Fuchs, Mellon; John Gage, Sun Microsystems; Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, and Donald Waters, Mellon. Berners-Lee said, “These awards are about open source. It’s a good thing because it makes our lives easier, and the award winners used open source to solve problems.”

Library of Congress?
The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, was that Plymouth State University would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and its license restrictions do not permit reuse or distribution. However, catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident.

“Libraries’ online presence is broken. We are more than study halls in the digital age. For too long, libraries have have been coming up with unique solutions for common problems,” Bisson said. “Users are looking for an online presence that serves them in the way they expect.” He said “The intention is to bring together the free or nearly-free services available to the user.”

Free download
Bisson said Plymouth State University is committed to supporting it, and will be offering it as a free download from its site, likely in the form of sample records plus WordPress with WP-OPAC included. “With nearly 140,000 registered users of Amazon Web Services, it’s time to use common solutions for our unique problems,” Bisson said.

The internal data structure works with iCal for calendar information and Flickr for photos, and can be used with historical records. It allows libraries to go beyond Library of Congress subject headings. Bisson said. Microformats are key to the internal data, and the OpenSearch API is used for interoperability. Bisson is looking at adding unAPI and OAI in the future.

At this time, there is no connection to the University of Rochester Mellon-funded project which is prototyping a new extensible catalog, though both are funded by Mellon. [see LJ Baker's Smudges, 9/1/2006]

Other winners include:Open University (Moodle), RPI (bedework), University of British Columbia Vancouver (Open Knowledge Project), Virginia Tech (Sakai), Yale (CAS single signon), University of Washington (pine and IMAP), Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), and Humboldt State University (Moodle).

LITA National Forum 2006

“Shift Happens”
Preservation, entertainment in the library, and integrating Library 2.0 into a Web 2.0 world dominated the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) National Forum in Nashville, TN, October 26-29, 2006.
With 378 registered attendees from 43 states and several countries, including Sweden and Trinidad, attendance held steady with previous years, though the Internet Librarian conference, held in the same week, attracted over 1300 librarians.
Free wireless has still not made it into technology conferences, though laptops were clearly visible, and the LITA blog faithfully kept up with sessions for librarians who were not able to attend.
Keynotes
The forum opened with a fascinating talk from librarians at the Country Music Hall of Fame entitled “Saving America’s Treasures.” Using Bridge Media Solutions in Nashville as a technology partner, the museum has migrated unique content from the Grand Ole Opry, including the first known radio session from October 14, 1939, as well as uncovering demos on acetate and glass from Hank Williams. The migration project uses open source software and will generate MARC records that will be submitted to OCLC.
Thom Gillespie of Indiana University described his shift from being a professor in the Library and Information Science program to launching a new program from the Telecommunications department. The MIME program for art, music, and new media has propelled students into positions at Lucas Arts, Microsoft, and other gaming companies. Gillespie said the program has practical value, “Eye candy was good but it’s about usability.” Saying that peering in is the first step but authoring citizen media is the future, he posed a provocative question: “What would happen if your library had a discussion of the game of the month?”
Buzz
Integration into user environments was a big topic of discussion. Peter Webster of St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, spoke about how embedded toolbars are enabling libraries to enter where users search.
Annette Bailey, digital services librarian at Virginia Tech, announced that the LibX project has received funding for two years from IMLS to expand their research toolbar into Internet Explorer as well as Firefox, and will let librarians build their own test editions of toolbars online.
Presenters from the Los Alamos National Laboratory described their work with MPEG-21, a new standard from the Motion Pictures Experts group. The standard reduces some of the ambiguities of METS, and allows for unique identifiers in locally-loaded content. Material from Biosis, Thomson’s Web of Science, APS, the Institute of Physics, Elsevier, and Wiley, is being integrated into cataloging operations and existing local Open Archives Initiative (OAI) repositories.
Tags and Maps
The University of Rochester has received funding for an open source catalog, which they are calling the eXtensible Catalog (xC). Using an export of 3 million records from their Voyager catalog, David Lindahl and Jeff Susczynski described how their team used User Centered Design to conduct field interviews with their users, sometimes in their dorm rooms. They have prototyped four different versions of the catalog, and CUPID 4 includes integration of several APIs, including Google, Amazon, Technorati, and OCLC’s xISBN. They are actively looking for partners for the next phase, and plan to work on issues with diacritics, incremental updates, and integrating holdings records, potentially using the NCIP protocol.
Challenge
Steven Abram, of Sirxi/Dynix and incoming SLA president, delivered the closing keynote, “Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 in our Future.” Abram and Sirsi/Dynix have conducted research on 15,000 users, which highlighted the need for community, learning, and interaction. He asked the audience, “Are you working in your comfort zone or my end user’s comfort zone?” In a somewhat controversial set of statements, Abram compared open source software to being “free like kittens” and challenged librarians about the “My OPAC sucks” meme that’s been popular this year. “Do your users want an OPAC, or do they want information?” Stating that libraries need to compete in an era when education is moving towards the distance learning model, Abram asked, “How much are we doing to serve the user when 60-80% of users are virtual?” Saying that librarians help people improve the quality of their questions, Abram said that major upcoming challenges include 50 million digitized books coming online in the next five years. “What is at risk is not the book. It’s us: librarians.”

Library Camp East

John Blyberg and company have organized an interesting unconference on Monday, September 25th called Library Camp East.

Looking forward to seeing how it functions, and meeting some fascinating library technologists.

Digipalooza begins

Overdrive’s first annual user group meeting was held in Cleveland, OH July 26-28. Mixing audio book publishers, public librarians, and hardware manufacturers, the gathering showcased innovative uses of digital media and upcoming features from Overdrive. New additions include a wiki for users (dlrwiki.overdrive.com), improved collection development tools with preordering capabilities and RSS feeds, and multilingual capabilities.
Although Overdrive content is not available for iPods, Overdrive “is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based DRM-protected materials on the iPod/Mac.”
Finally, the New York Public Library announced their plans to roll out a direct download service (ebooks.nypl.org), which will enable patrons to read digital content directly from their phones and other devices.
This is a welcome development, since discovery and download is quite a process right now. It took me over 30 minutes to figure out how to get the Mobipocket version of Freakonomics onto my Treo, and it was a little disheartning to find that the old models of print (placing holds, books that expire) have been replicated. I did like the lack of overdue fines, though.

The Ghost Map

The Ghost Map, Johnson, Steven; Riverhead Hardcover