Found a fantastic slideshow covering the basics of Open Source ILS software via the Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian:
Direct link to the slides on SlideShare
A List Apart has been a steady source of thought-provoking inspiration over the years, not only from a website building perspective, but also because much of what they publish crosses boundaries and impacts other projects and interests in my life.
Their current article, Accent Folding, greatly impacts library data in general, and library catalogs in particular. It deals with the issue of Unicode and pattern recognition, namely how one creates search tools that allow for variations in how words containing accents, stress marks, and other non-ascii characters. The most succinct example:
There is no excuse for your software to play dumb when the user types “cafe” instead of “café.”
The article presents methods of “normalizing” text to allow for proper matching, and should be read by anyone who gets to deal with library data for reports and searching aids. If you know how to use regular expressions, you will likely be in for a treat.
The other example they present, this time to demonstrate the limitations of accent folding, uses Japanese to illustrate just how differently the same data can be presented:
These four sentences all say “Children like to watch television” in Japanese:
- Kanji: 子供はテレビを見るのが好きです。
- Hiragana: こども は てれび を みる の が すき です 。
- Romaji: kodomo wa terebi o miru noga suki desu.
- Cyrillic: кодомо ва тэрэби о миру нога суки дэсу.
Even if you don’t end up applying this directly to your work, the information in this article will help your appreciation for the challenges contained within your data, and how tough it can be to make it “just work” sometimes.
Library Technology Guides has a couple of interesting data sets that, in a limited way, shows some of the dynamic patterns in the Integrated Library System (ILS) market:
Integrated Library System turnover in 2009 (listed by the ILS migrated to)
Reverse Integrated Library system turnover in 2009 (listed by the ILS migrated from)
It is interesting to note that a great deal of activity involves libraries moving to open source systems, mainly Koha (143) or Evergreen (92). The top proprietary system is SirsiDynix’s Symphony (84), but over 70 of those installations are from other SirsiDynix products. After that, the numbers drop to the 40-something range.
Note that these only reflect libraries that have their relevant information listed in Lib-Web-Cats. If your library isn’t listed, you should submit your information; if listed, you should double-check your information and update if necessary.
found via GuidePosts
I see these types of messages all the time on library-related websites, and I agree that it sends the message that those who manage those sites don’t have a good grasp of current web technology:
Time to Update? by David Lee King.
Check the web sites that your library presents to the world. If you see messages like those highlighted by David, start talking to people about getting them up to date (or better yet, getting rid of them, since a good standards-designed site will work well across browsers and browser versions).
My former place of work (FPOW) used to have Social Security numbers as college ID numbers, which were written on book checkout cards. About ten years ago, we switched to an ILS and began generating in-house ID numbers for students.
This transition worked well, and when we conducted our next inventory we removed every checkout card from all of the books. There had been growing concerns about ID theft, and completing this task eased our minds.
Has your institution used Social Security numbers as library identifiers? Do you have checkout cards in your books that could lead to ID theft? If so, do you have a plan to remove them?
It is best to be proactive about this sort of thing. You don’t want to wake up to the type of news story that the University of Toledo did this morning.
found via LISNews
May All Your Standards Be Simple and Evolvable is a post by John Wilbanks on Science Blog’s Common Knowledge. It is written with medical data standards in mind, but it could be discussing the state of library data as well:
“…TCP/IP, created simply to move bits between computers, begat a variety of new protocols like FTP, Gopher, Finger, many other protocols that layered atop the basic bits standard. Complexity from simplicity. Attempting to embed file transfer into the bits protocol would have made this whole process a lot harder.”
We are approaching a point in which we will be moving our data out of the cumbersome and outdated MARC format. It will happen, regardless of the heel-dragging that has been taking place for over 10 years. The debate is still heated over what we will replace the standard with.
Can we come up with something simple and evolvable? I define this as being able to build things out of data without having to break the it up into usable chunks. Have you looked at a MARC (.mrc) record with a text editor? There is no easy way to determine what much of the data means, and the entire record is one string of information. You can usually pick out the title, author and a few other things, but mostly it looks like gobbledygook.
If our data were in nice, small, understandable pieces to begin with, with straightforward rules guiding how it was formatted, it would invite innovation and creative use. We are only hindering ourselves with the complexity and arcane rules; simplicity would serve everyone’s needs far better.
Brett Bonfield has a great post, actually more of a long essay or article, on open source library software projects. W-E-B-S-I-T-E, Find Out What It Means To Me (great title, but certainly more limited than the post’s topic) covers a wide range of software, the reasons people use (or don’t use) them, and the status of several of the larger projects that currently exist.
There is a lot of information in the post, and links for further exploration. This just made my recommended reading list.
The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) has weighed in on OCLC’s proposed policy changes. Of note:
“The proposed policy appears to freeze OCLC’s role in the library community based on historical and current relationships. We share the concern, voiced by many, that the policy hinders rather than encourages innovation, and we urge the Review Board to carefully examine this issue. It is unclear that the policy has been constructed with a focus on an evolving role of OCLC in enhancing the missions of an international library community with diverse and complex interests.”
This may not seem like a strongly worded statement, but take a look at the list of consortia behind the statement (located at the bottom of the statement, linked above). Is your library, or geographic region, represented by one or more of these? Based on the consortia I recognize, this statement has thousands of libraries behind it.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick, you shall go far”, Theodore Roosevelt’s iconic statement, applies very well to this statement.
My own addition to the current state of events is that the broad-based library community needs to be strongly involved with the record use policy, especially now that OCLC has solidly entered the ILS arena with their new WorldCat functionality. If they are able to use access and use of the records as a way to encourage/coerce/retain customers, they likely someday will. It makes good business sense, even if it is lousy public relations.
Further reading:
Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian
Oracle has purchased Sun Microsystems.
This is significant on many levels. Many of our library systems run on software or hardware from these companies. The Voyager library I used to work for used an Oracle database running on a Sun Solaris server. The clients (Circulation, Cataloging, Acquisitions, etc.) for III’s Millennium system run on Java.
Many web-based software platforms use MySQL (an open-source database project owned by Sun), including many, many blogs (including this one) wikis and CMS.
Many of us use OpenOffice as either their primary or as an additional office suite.
I am not saying that we are at risk for losing these foundations of our library and internet software programs. The fact that OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice are all open source means that we can trust that they will be with us in some form for as long as there is a demand (a trust that cannot be equally placed with any closed source software, which can disappear with the collapse or acquisition of the company holding the software rights).
What I am sure of is that we will see changes. Oracle has a strategy, or if it doesn’t, it will. Some of these programs will likely see greater support and resources (hopefully OpenOffice), others will likely see less (hopefully none of them). Some may become more focused towards a particular segment of the technology world (watch MySQL for this possibility).
Look at what you use, and recognize that today marks a turning point for some of the software. Hopefully it is for the better.
found via TechCrunch and MetaFilter
For those interested in Open Source Integrated Library Systems such as Koha, Evergreen, Open Library Environment Project (OLE), OpenBiblio, etc., the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) will be holding an e-forum on April 21st and 22nd. From the announcement:
Please join us for a free ALCTS e-forum discussion! Participation is open to all.
April 21-22, 2009: Open Source ILS and Technical Services: High Risk or High Reward?
Moderated by Clint Chamberlain, University of Texas Libraries, and Rob Van Rennes, University of Iowa Libraries, members of the ALCTS CRS Acquisitions Committee.
Over the past few years, many librarians have expressed dissatisfaction with our current ILS, citing inflexible systems, high costs, and lackluster vendor service. Some libraries have consequently pursued Open Source ILS such as OLE, Koha, and Evergreen. Join this e-forum to share your experiences with and your questions about Open Source ILS and your thoughts on the future of the traditional, proprietary ILS. We are particularly interested in hearing about experiences with the technical services aspects of Open Source ILS: acquisitions, management of continuing resources, and cataloging.
Discussion will start Tuesday, April 21, 9AM EST and will conclude Wednesday, April 22, 5PM EST.
You can sign up at http://lists.ala.org/sympa/, go to the ALCTS section, then select alcts-eforum@ala.org.
I am especially interested in hearing about how the Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Circulation functions are viewed by people who use them in a production environment. Koha and Evergreen have been making incredible progress into the library world, and I suspect that many of us will have experience with them before long.
received via SerialsT list
Marc was a Good & Loyal Mule but Now It’s Time to Shoot It is a post over on the Future4catalogers blog that does an effective job at explaining why the library community should be focusing on using a new, more powerful (and easier to learn, use, explain, and mashup) metadata structure.
I suspect that part of the problem lies with people who don’t really know what a marc record looks like, and why it is nearly impossible to work with in its native form. From the essay:
To do anything with a Marc record, it must be disassembled and reconstituted in pieces. Even the displays we see as Marc workforms require this disassembly and reassembly to make it comprehensible to catalogers.
Most see the nicely formatted row-by-row marc view that can be seen on some library OPACs as well as cataloging software in our ILS platforms. If you have ever opened a pure marc file in a text editor, you would quickly conclude that locating and understanding information in the record is very challenging, and the thought of editing the record in this form is crazy talk.
If a good and robust metadata format were used instead, then the data could be arranged and edited in a wide variety of ways (including replication of the standard cataloging interface). Even better, however, is that one can open, view, and edit the record (or even a large group of records) within a text editor (though there are and will be many tools to streamline and simplify the process).
A recent post, and the resulting discussion, on Metafilter has put me in a Unicode font frenzy. A few links of note from there and elsewhere:
As someone who has worked with an ILS that didn’t have Unicode support, which was then upgraded to support Unicode, and then changed jobs and is now working with an ILS with very limited Unicode support, I have a great appreciation for the benefits of Unicode.
Libraries should, in all that they do, attempt to store and present data in Unicode. This includes our catalogs, web sites, and other data repositories. Even if you offer very little outside of the standard Western characters, it makes your data that much more accessible and useful.
The State Library of Ohio has just released a Request For Proposal for an Open Source Statewide Resource Sharing System (Pdf).
Their summary page (which will soon contain an F.A.Q.) states that
The desired product would provide a seamless resource sharing solution, developed and released under an open source framework, in an environment of disparate integrated library systems (ILSs).
Looking briefly through the document, it looks to me as if the closest software in the library world is the Open-ILS Evergreen project, which is the platform for Georgia Library Pines system. The largest challenge might be the system’s need to communicate with a wide variety of existing ILS platforms.
The timeline is ambitious: Proposals are due by the end of January; a vendor will be selected and contracts signed by mid-March, a test system will be in place by September, and the system as a whole will go live in February 2010. Wow.
Assuming that the vendor selection process goes well (Equinox and LibLime, are you ready?), this will be a very exciting time to be involved with Ohio libraries! I am psyched!
Read Lori Ayre’s blog post at TechEssence to find out what she means by “Learned Helplessness”. I think she hits the nail on the head, then drives it home. I will be watching her future posts….
LibraryLookup is a nifty tool that creates a bookmarklet that automatically searches whatever library catalog you configure it to use. The bookmarklet generator has twenty ILS packages in their list, and they offer to at least attempt to configure others on request.
I set one up for my work’s ILS, and it was effortless. The only pieces of information needed are 1) the root url for the catalog and 2) the brand of ILS. Unfortunately, the average library user would find those to be challenging to answer. The good news is that everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so it would be easy for a library to add an already-configured bookmarklet to their own website with instructions of the “click and drag” variety”.
found via Lorcan Demsey’s weblog
One additional note… this is my 500th post! I know the number on the URL is a bit higher, but due to the way that WordPress handles posts, this actually works out to be the big “D“. I am excited to see what the next 500 will be like!
I had hoped to make a big announcement with this post, but it is still a couple of days from being ready for public consumption, so we all get to wait. And it isn’t about the book, either….
Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation contains the results of a survey conducted by Marshall Breeding. He explored the relationship between libraries and their Integrated Library Systems (ILS).
The results are interesting. Without going into my own views of the two systems I have worked with, I feel that some libraries just don’t know how they have it – both good and bad. I would like to see statistics from those who have worked with more than one ILS within the past five years, because I suspect that some of the rankings might change dramatically.
That said, it is very good to see a snapshot of people’s satisfaction levels of their software and the companies that support it. This may well reflect how well companies (and ILSs) will do in the next 5 years or so.
One surprise, sort of, is the low level of interest in Open Source ILS. Part of this is due to fact that Open Source ILS is just really beginning to be used in the United States – as more libraries use the systems over time, we will have a better understanding of the satisfaction they have (or won’t have) with them.
The other part goes back to not knowing what we are missing. For instance, I have worked with database reporting with both Voyager and Millennium, and Voyager is by far the most powerful and useful, as you are able to extract data from the Oracle DB directly into Microsoft Access and manipulate it with any SQL you can create. Millennium has a built in extracter, and I have discovered that it saves a great deal of time and headaches to simply export large chunks of data into a text file, then import it into Access and work on it there.
(note: Millennium has a pricey add-on that adds an Oracle database to their system to enable this; I don’t have it at my current place of work, and cannot judge how well it handles the type of queries and reporting I am discussing)
found via GuidePosts
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