I just found the Open Source Conversations Podcast - sounds pretty interesting. If you’re interested in open source you might want to give it a listen.

I just read a really neat analogy for open source software:

Back to my son, (I’m a proud parent, can you tell?) at 5am when I was mixing him up a bottle (I do one nightly feed so his mum can get some sleep) I was thinking about how doing this was a lot like FLOSS. I got to choose how much water to put in the bottle, how much formula, how warm to make the bottle and when to do it. I took advice from people who know more (midwives, obstetricians) about how much approximately he should be drinking and used that to guide my decisions, but ultimately as my wife and I know our son better than anyone, the decision was ours. This is the same with Open Source software, the people who know the most about their needs get to choose how to use it.

Written by Chris Cormack on the LibLime Developers’ Blog.

Or something like that I just read about Koha ZOOM at the Nelsonville Public Library System via oss4lib and it sounds yummy!

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced today that the Nelsonville Public Library System in Athens Ohio has just gone live with Koha ZOOM, and they couldn’t be more pleased. Koha ZOOM includes a powerful, full-featured search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM catapults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards-compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. For those libraries who have been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems, the wait is over. Koha ZOOM is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.

And in true Open Source form:

Of course, the true power of open-source is in the ability to customize and to steer the direction of development. The integration of Koha and Zebra is yet another success story demonstrating the power of open-source software collaboration. As with all open-source projects, the value of sponsored development is in quality assurance. Purchasing development services guarantees that adequate time and resources are allocated to creating a production-ready product. No one library has to shoulder all development costs and, unlike proprietary software, all libraries using the product are not forced to foot the bill for development by paying hefty annual licensing fees. Libraries benefit from the developments sponsored or contributed by other libraries. Everyone wins.

That’s the whole point isn’t it? For us all to help each other so that we can all have amazing (user-friendly) resources to offer our users? I love it!!

I just read on Google Operating System about two new goodies. One I can’t get to load - so I’m going to send you to Google Operating System to read what they have to say about it. This one is Google Image Labeler. It apparently lets you add tags to images found in Google’s image search to help them with their indexing. Learn more from the people who actually got the page to load.

The other is an open source OCR program called Tesseract. Google announced that they have released Tesseract (originally an HP program) into open source because the people at Google…

are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.

Sounds interesting - I doubt it will replace my Abbyy FineReader, but it’s interesting to keep an eye on.

Why is it that when open source is mentioned some people (librarians/techies/programmers/etc) get mean? I have not had a chance to read Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software by Paul N. Couran (Principal Investigator) and Rebecca J. Griffith - but after reading some comments I will be making time today.

Over at The Medium is the Message, Eric asks Are OPAC Vendors Days Numbered? He states:

I suspect the the combination of open source and the reluctance of vendors to keep their systems up to date will result result in the demise of significant number of commerical library vendors in the next five years. The poor performance and outdated products of commercial OPAC products is due largely to the disconnect between developers in software firms and their customers. This should be an advantage to library developers, and the timing to look at open source networks/incubators is ripe.

To which commenter bcarson responds:

I have worked in five different public, academic and medical libraries and with five different library systems. (Innovative, NOTIS, Dynix, some Mac-based system whose name is the one thing I can’t remember about it, and a homegrown system that was easily the worst of the lot).

What ever happened to “if at first you don’t succeed try, try again”?

First - homegrown (to me) means built in-house. If you don’t have a programmer in-house that cares about libraries and what the librarians want and need - you’re going to get a substandard application. Our library has applications built by outside programmers and applications written by me - and if I do say so myself, the time I spend researching our librarians needs far outweighs the time the outsiders spent. This is why you want a librarian or library supporter to write your code - not a computer programmer who thinks he/she knows what’s best despite the cries of the staff.

Second - just because you tried one “homegrown” application does not mean that all open source options are bad! Open source is just now coming into its own - it’s growing in support - which means it’s growing in user base - which means you have a much large community to help support and upgrade your application. And with some/most open source applications - it costs you nothing but time to give it a try before bashing it.

Another commenter, Darla Grediagin, mentions that she and her library are switching to Koha.

I will be able to stop giving money away to a company for support every year and use that money to add the bells and whistles that I want to my system. The only problem with the additions I make, Hmmm…. I have to share them with others. Wow, what is one of the major components of a librarian — we share. I think open source will be a great way to go.

She too is met with a skeptical (and rather rude) commenter (on her blog post - not her comment).

It just makes me angry when people dismiss open source because it’s free or because it’s not supported by a big company. As far as I’m concerned big companies are great - but they’re full of faceless people who don’t know me or my library. If I can develop (and support) something for my library or any other library and then am given the opportunity to share that code with other libraries to make their lives easier - I’m all for it!

I agree with Darla - sharing is a major part of being a librarian - and open source is all about sharing - see the connection??

Google now has a competing site for SourceForge - at least that’s what it sounds like to me. The new site is called Google Code - Project Hosting.

The new service from Google is a hosting environment called Project Hosting, that allows developers to upload and store any open-source project code they have in their arsenal. It also allows those interested, to search and download open source codes in Python, C++, Java, Audio, XML, CSharp, Graphics, and many other formats.

Learned about from Download Squad.

I just read on Download Squad about this nifty CD.

The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society has put together a CD with 100 free/open source application for Windows XP/2000 users. You can pay for the CD or you can download an ISO file straight from their site. The CD includes Desktop Applications, Educational Programs, Games, Graphics Software, Internet Tools, Server Related Programs, Apps for Sound and Video, and Utilities.

Pretty handy if you just bought a new computer and don’t want to download everything all over again.