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).

LibLime powers Koha and now Evergreen

Making the link from a statewide project to something more:

LibLime is one option for libraries outside Georgia interested in Evergreen. Joshua Ferraro, LibLime president, said they provide “hosting, data migration, installation, training, and technical support” to libraries looking to switch to Evergreen. LibLime was retained by the PINES project during development to provide Quality Assurance and National Circulation Interface Protocol (NCIP) support.

Ferraro said, “[PINES] librarians are happy because both circulation and holds are up. Plus, suggestions are sometimes implemented within hours.” One benefit of open-source projects is the visibility of the bug list, where enhancements and problems can be openly tracked.

LibLime currently has four employees and partners with ten subcontractors, and is hiring another four employees for development and support with expectations of hiring four more in the near future. The company has 50 clients, including public libraries in Ohio and libraries in France, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada, and interest from large public library systems.

The company’s origins are in the Koha project, an open-source ILS developed for New Zealand libraries. Ferraro became familiar with Koha when he implemented it with Stephen Hedges, then-director at the Nelsonville Public Library, OH, and he was chosen as release manager for Koha version 3.

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.”

NetConnect Fall 2006 podcast episode 1

This is the first episode of the Open Libraries podcast, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk to some of the authors of the Fall netConnect supplement, entitled Libraries 2010. It features three librarians, including Karen Coombs, University of Houston Libraries; Melissa Rethlefsen, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, and Dorothea Salo, George Mason University. They talk about their articles in the Fall 2006 issue of netConnect, as well as Zotero, project management tips, using social software, and the upcoming online conference Five Weeks to a Social Library.

The issue covers how libraries are doing strategic planning for the next four years, particularly with online initiatives. The Product Pipeline article covers social reference services, including Connotea and CiteULike.

You will be able to read the articles online. We’re eager to hear your comments about the episode, since we’re still figuring things out as we go.

Show notes:
Dorothea strongly recommends the newly-released Zotero for citation capture
What problem does social software solve? Think “group projects”
One low barrier tool for library project management: Google Calendar
Learn about the surprising profitability of society publishers

Firefox Extensions:
CustomizeGoogle
TabMixPlus

Text Editors:
oXygen
Eclipse

0 Music and Intro
2:45 Dorothea on Zotero
4:23 Social Software=”Group Projects”
5:38 Karen on Writely
7:00 Melissa on Mayo
8:43 Karen on Project Management
12:40 Dorothea on repositories
16:40 Melissa on open access
18:20 Dorothea on open access monoliths
20:20 Melissa on society publishers
22:21 Karen on Texas Digital Library project
25:19 ARL Spec Kit on Institutional Repositories
26:34 MARS is 2
27:00 Karen on early adopters
27:50 DSpace Hacks
28:26 Open source projects and plugins
33:13 CVS for DSpace
34:25 Karen on wikis, blogs, and production
36:45 Melissa on Mayo’s Live Journal project
40:40 Evangelizing your project
43:13 The freedom to fail
43:47 Library School
45:00 Recommended books and software
49:20 Long Tail and Recommendation of Crowds
51:14 Eclipse
52:17 Open Access and Terry Prachett
54:08 Upcoming conference presentations
57:22 Five Weeks to a Social Library

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

Steven Johnson’s new book traces a single week in the 19th century of the cholera epidemic. Dr. John Snow is the hero who shows that the water is the source of transmission, and Johnson demonstrates how the design of cities is intricately tied to health and civilization.

“Rehydrate.”

Flickr in Libraries

The Libraries and Librarians Flickr group, which populates the front page of this weblog, now has over 750 members and 4000 photos.

And group subscriptions can be exported in OPML format from the Recent Groups page.

Update: A few libraries using del.icio.us.

And the ALA is on flickr.

Using Drupal to put Endnote online

There is still no easy way to manage a library of references on a personal or institutional site. Librarians who want to put up a list of institutional publications, or researchers who want to share references are limited by existing software limitations, privacy concerns, or technical road blocks. This problem has been mitigated by a open source CMS with a handy bibliographic data module.

The Drupal content management system is attractive to many librarians and information scientists because of its deep use of taxonomy. Daniel Chudnov uses it to power Open Source Systems for Libraries, and his personal weblog, One Big Library. Roy Tennant uses Drupal for the TechEssence.info, and the Ann Arbor Public Library uses it for user registration, resource weblogs, and the overall site.

However, state of the art in bibliographic management and collaboration is still stuck in 1990. When a writer wants to collect articles, there are a number of client applications (all owned by Thomson ISI ResearchSoft, including Endnote, ProCite, and Reference Manager, plus WriteNote) that do a nice job of saving the references and integrating with word processors to format the citations.

Endnote is the most commonly-used program, but it was not designed to share references. Modern science is all about collaboration, from grant proposals to international research. In the worst case, sharing an Endnote library on a network server can cause corruption. In the best case, shared Endnote libraries are limited to read-only if another person has it open, which limits collaboration.

A version of EndnoteWeb has been in development for most of 2006, and is promised by January of next year. Early reports of integration with Web of Science tell of limited functionality and interoperability.

In 2002, a number of former Reference Manager employees waited for their non-compete agreements with ISI to expire, then founded RefWorks, an online version of the familiar bibliographic managers.In the last two years, applications including Connotea and CiteULike have integrated bilbiographic manager capabilities to their social bookmarking applications. Both allow RIS and BibTeX upload and download to systems managed at Nature Publishing Group and the University of Manchester, respectively.

At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory the annual reports of the institution have listed lab publications for over 100 years. These references have not been added to Pubmed, which still only goes back to 1950. Thus, this unique information needed to be put into a format so that scholars could cite the early history of genetics, and the tragic misfire of eugenics research.

Many approachs were tried. One early method was programmer-centric, where the data was entered into a SQL database and a web front-end was scripted to add basic fields. While this was a promising start, it left out the rich data fields that enable bibliographic managers to capture complete citation information.

Since the library was examining digital asset management systems, Greenstone was assessed for its citation abilities. Ian Witten was able to jury-rig a solution that imported RIS information about citations, but getting them to display in a full way wasn’t simple.

As the prototyping continued, the initial database of 1800 records was exported out of the SQL database into comma separated value (CSV) format, and imported into Endnote. The archives clerk started assessing the reference types, and added new fields. For example, Institution was added so that a sort by the name could be used. A new reference type was added for non-standard reports.

In the process of adding this information, Endnote’s integration with OpenURL became useful. Using the standard bibliographic fields, it was possible to launch a search that queried the library’s subscriptions to see if a full-text version existed. And for many articles in Science magazine, a full-text scan was available.

In the short-term, links to the JSTOR archive were added to Endnote. Longer-term, it would be useful to put in COinS from the web interface so that every citation could be queried via OpenURL.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory already had a site license for Endnote, so switching to RefWorks wasn’t feasible. In addition, the local version of Connotea isn’t exacly lightweight to deploy, requriing two MySQL databases and memcached to handle the online load. Since Nature is currently funding the open-source project, questions were raised about the continuting development of the project.

The archives clerk finished the authority control work on the Endnote database, which included hand-checking the references to the print version of the annual reports. Once this was completed, a need was voiced to make these references available online.

Ron Jeromeof the National Research Council Canada Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology wrote a Bibliography module for Drupal which allows Endnote import in .enw or XML formats. This module is currently being extended to allow Open Archives Initiative harvesting.

This module was installed, and the 2200 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory publications from 1890-1950 were imported into MySQL. The display is clear, and the default display is citation format. All other fields were imported, but live in the database for display on demand.

This module holds great promise for archive integration, since harvesting by OAI would allow libraries to harvest the records from web resources that aren’t specifically enabled for archives management. Endnote format is a lowest barrier format for scientists and researchers.

In the future, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory hopes to integrate these early records with the other archives collections managed by Digitool. For now, other laboratories and libraries can use Drupal and the Bibliography module for easy reference sharing.

Amusing post about weblogs

Wired 14.07: START

Your Blog Blows, and Here’s Why

1. You aren’t kamikaze enough to risk your career by revealing the soul-crushing absurdity of your job.

2. You aren’t sufficiently vain or presumptuous to declare yourself a hot twentysomething female (even if it’s true).

3. You lack a diagnosed sleep disorder, minor substance abuse problem, mercurial temperament, and/or innate desire to alienate loved ones.

4. You’re not ready to declare on the Internet what you really think about the raging hypocrites nesting in your life.

5. You have yet to explore the wonders of shameless self-promotion, groveling, and media whoring. Profiles in The New York Times don’t always come free.

– Ruth Fowler