It’s finally here! After tons of hard work, the Koha community has announced the release of Koha 3.0 RC1. This from the many Koha mailing lists:
You can download from the usual location:
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-stableRC1.tar.gz.sig
You can check the integrity of the package; either by verifying the provided GPG signature (.sig) or by comparing the MD5 checksum:
5cc0914c5e8250c2491f4dbcf27d4301 [...]

Today I watched another talk that touched on some of the issues I mentioned after watching Clay Shirky’s video. In Yochai Benkler talk entitled Open-source economics, he talks about how people who are passionate about topics and technologies are using the web to change the way we look at economics.
Once example [...]

Amy De Groff, Head of Library Technology Services talked to us about using open source at the Howard County Public Library. Amy started by telling us that she was not going to convince us that open source is a good thing - the other speakers had already done enough of that.
Amy’s library will [...]

Glen Horton talked to us about how libraries can give back to open source.
Libraries and open source are fundamentally related - both …

believe that information should be freely accessible to everyone

we like to give away stuff

we benefits from generosity of others (part Glen is going to talk about)

are about communities

make the world a better place

One [...]

I love listening to Marshall Breeding present - it always makes me feel better to know that someone can talk faster than me Marshall started his talk by showing us the lib-web-cats advanced search which allows you to search for libraries running specific systems. He did remind us to keep in mind that [...]

If you’re around and want to join in a class I’m giving on open source, please join me at the Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative on April 2, 2008. Learn more.

Elizabeth McKinney de Garcia, Program Director of Georgia PINES talked to us about how PINES decided to develop their own open-source ILS, Evergreen. Georgia PINES is made up of 49 public library systems which equates to 275 facilities and bookmobiles sharing a joint bibliographic database of nearly 9 million books.
About PINES
The PINES library card is [...]

After talks by Joe Lucia, Bob Molyneux and Joshua Ferraro we had a Q&A sessions at the VALE symposium. I’m going to put these in note format so that you can hopefully follow who said what:
Q: One person’s enhancement might be another person’s bug - how do you control that with open source?
A:

Joe - [...]

Next up, LibLime’s Joshua Ferraro. Josh talked to us about why LibLime was started and what both LibLime & Koha could do for libraries.

Originally uploaded by nengard
Why start LibLime?
Josh would often hear librarians saying that they liked the idea of open source, but we have no way to support it. So, Josh started LibLime [...]

Bob Molyneux of Equinox was second to speak at the VALE Symposium the other day.
Bob started by filling us in on the state of the open-source software US public library market which is only about 1%, give or take. He didn’t have the data for academic libraries yet, but he was sure it was [...]

This week I was lucky enough to attend an event at The College of New Jersey entitled Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium and hosted by VALE (Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey). The goal of this day was for the members of VALE to decide if they wanted to join in on [...]

PLA is coming upon us very quickly! I just wanted to let you all know that I’ll be there probably at the booth most of the time - so stop by and see me. I also want to bring your attention to the Koha Interest Group meeting that we’re holding.
Time and Place
Date: Thursday, [...]

In Andrew Nagy’s presentation From Idea to Open Source, he took us through the process of creating VuFind, an open-source OPAC replacement/Library portal.
At Villanova, they wanted to develop a portal for library patrons that would let people search the catalog, the article databases and digital library all in one - and keep it separate from [...]

Yesterday Mozilla announced that Firefox has been downloaded 500 million times!!
Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, [...]

As you know, I’ve recently gotten my first Mac. I’m still learning. One of the features I like the most is Finder. Last night my husband installed an awesome Windows app that gives Finder functionality to his PC - Launchy.
Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about [...]

Now that I’m the Open Source Evangelist at LibLime, it’s my job to blog at Open Sesame (a long abandoned blog). Now that the blog is up and running I encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed and keep an eye on the open source news I post there.
Technorati Tags: open source, liblime

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

More of my links

My new Macbook thanks me
Originally uploaded by nengard

This week I’m in Ohio to learn about my new job at LibLime. First on the agenda - learn how to use a Mac … yikes!
So far, I’m pretty impressed, I keep hitting the wrong buttons and can’t figure out where the home and [...]

When I give my blog presentations I always mention MovableType, but I also mention that it’s not open source like WordPress (which is my blog tool of choice). Now, MovableType has an open source free option for non-commercial use.
As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely [...]

I don’t where to begin with this. I have just read several different blogs/emails/releases all about this amazing leap for the open source ILS & other open source library tools.
Let’s start with Roy:
So anyway, here’s the skinny: IndexData, WebFeat, and CARE Affiliates have partnered to create a service they’ve dubbed OpenTranslators. In [...]

From a post by Joseph Lucia at Villanova on the ngc4lib mailing list:
If we look beyond money to personnel, the option looks even better. Let me suggest some numbers. What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one [...]

This sounds very promising. The eXtensible Catalog project has received more funding. I love seeing open source library apps moving forward:
A $749,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University’s River Campus Libraries will be used toward building and deploying the eXtensible Catalog (XC), a set of open-source software applications libraries [...]

I bookmarked this resource ages ago - but apparently it was only recently released:
The first official alpha version of Google’s OCRopus scanning software for Linux was released yesterday. OCRopus is built on top of HP’s venerable open-source Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine and is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
OCRopus uses Tesseract for character [...]

I’m not sure if I’ll stick to using a desktop calendar (versus web), but I do like that I can import in and write to my Google Calendar via the new Sunbird release, so I want to give it a shot.
[via DownloadSquad]

Chris Cormack, Vice President, Research & Development at LibLime, is the winner of the New Zealand Open Source Awards for contributions to the Koha Project and Koha itself was a finalist for the best Open Source Project. Check out the awards.
Technorati Tags: koha, ils, new zealand awards, open source