Ramblings about library technology, open source software, and other adventures!

The Koha community has decided to create a new home for Koha on the Internet. The new URL is http://koha-community.org/. The stated reason is that the host of the old site, LibLime, was not responsive in updated the previous site. I really haven’t been following the LibLime and Koha saga that closely but it is clear that the actions (or in this case, inactions) of LibLime have left a bad taste in many people’s mouth and it is a shame that it has come to this. Much of the success the Koha has had, at least in the United States, can be directly traced to the work of LibLime. It is sad to see that they appear to be no longer an integral part of the community.

When I started this blog way back in October, 2004 I started it on a Linux Virtual Private Server hosted by Redwoodvirtual. Although I moved my blog about a year ago to another provider, I kept my Redwood account although I really only used it for SSH access to IRC. Still, it was with a bit of sadness I recieved the following in an e-mail the other day:

Due to many factors we have decided to close redwoodvirtual. This is a difficult decision to make after being in business for six years.

Our last day of operation will be March 24th, 2010 at noon. This will give one last month for monthly accounts to migrate to another host provider. For yearly accounts we will refund the remaining amount, prorated from March 24th, 2010. If you have any questions, please emails us at support@redwoodvirtual.com.

We apologize for the sudden announcement, but wish you all the best.

Sincerely,
the Redwoodvirtual Support Staff
support@redwoodvirtual.com

While Redwoodvirtual was not always the most responsive company, they were also very inexpensive and overall doing business with them was a positive experience. I’m sorry to see them shut their virtual doors and I wish them good luck in their future endeavors.

Before I moved to my current position as Head of Library Technology, I was the systems department at my previous job. That meant I had to do almost everything when it came to library-specific technology and applications. It was rewarding and allowed me to do a lot of things the way I thought best. Now that I run a department, albeit a small one, that is no longer the case. I need to let the people in my department have the freedom to do their job (which luckily for me, they are excellent at). This creates a bit of a sense of loss of control. I don’t have time to micro-manage everything to make sure everything is done my way. As long as things are getting done in a timely manner that serves the goals and mission of the Libraries, than all is good. This seems logical but when I first moved into this role and was doing more managerial tasks than before I felt a bit lost, I missed doing everything my way. While I am not a Vice President and I still do plenty of hands on stuff because of the size of my department, I related to the blog post on Insider Higher Ed by Kent Barnds. In his blog post, Making the To-Be List, Brands makes 6 recommendations for those moving to an administrative role. They are:

1. Do not mourn and dwell upon the loss of control
2. Redefine “doing”
3. Embrace delayed gratification
4. Serve as a real mentor
5. Listen actively
6. Applaud others’ successes

I think he offers some good advice and I would recommend anyone thinking about moving or who has recently moved into a more managerial or administrative role to read the post.

One of the major reasons I became interested enough in the concept of Libraries and Democracy (well, besides being a librarian and a fan of democracy), is the work of John Buschman. In particular, his book “Dismantling the Public Sphere Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy.” While I am sure that I will use that book as one of my sources for the paper I’m presenting at the Networking Democracy? New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics symposium, for those who are interesting in a short introduction into Buschman’s work in this area, should read his article, On Libraries and the Public Sphere, that appeared in Library Philosophy and Practice Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 2005).

On Libraries and the Public Sphere is the text of an address that Buschman gave at Rider University and does a good job of introducing the role that Libraries can, and should, play in public discourse. One thing I think that should stand out to librarians from this address is:

If information and its related sets of critical skills are as important to economic and political participation as we keep insisting, then what information we produce, how we keep it, what we keep, and how it is absorbed or not are crucial questions in our culture – and libraries are important (if undervalued) institutions in this.

I think most people will recognized that in order to have a strong democracy, the electorate needs to be informed. Libraries can, and have in the past, played an important role in this. After all, we are in an information economy so information organizations should be seen as important. For those not familiar with the concept of the public sphere, Buschman explains it in terms of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s work. Habermas asked how and why democratic governments come out of closed political systems that were based on the divine rights of kings. Buschman explains that Habermas’s answer is that a a “sphere if non-governmental opinion making” developed from the marcantile economies of northern Europe. As people gathered in new urban places such as coffee houses political conversations took place. These were assisted, or informed, by the intellectual press of the day. This caused two crucial things happened:

1. Opinion became communicated and recorded outside of a small group of family and friends.
2. The principle that in order for (governmental) power to become legitimate, its proceedings need to be made public.

Buschman then goes on to relate how libraries are a part of Habermas’s definition of the public sphere:

• Libraries house and further rational discourse through the organization of collections coupled with the principle of unfettered information access.
• The field enacts the principle of critique and rational argumentation through the commitment to balanced collections, preserving them over time, and furthering inclusion through active attempts to make collections and resources reflect historical and current intellectual diversity.
• By their very existence libraries potentially verify (or refute) claims to authority in making current and retrospective organized resources available to check the bases of a thesis, law, book, article, policy etc. continuing the process of debate which lies at the heart of the public sphere and democracy.
• By policy and practice, [librarianship] has sought to reach out to those not served – or sometimes not wishing to be served! – to make access to information and education more widely and universally available.

Thus, Buschman believes that libraries have a fundamental connection to the needs of democracy and “when we debate information and communication and the future of libraries, we’re debating democracy by other means.” Librarians should keep this democratic role in mind when making decisions involving the procurement and preservation of materials. By competing with big box bookstores, libraries risk evacuating their historical polices of public purpose, broad representation, and fairness in exchange for an immediate payoff for the institution.

Buschhman says that truly informed debate “remains the essence of both education and democracy and libraries play a pivotal role in both.” Librarians and the people who run the parent organizations of libraries such as local governments and universities would do well to keep this in mind when making decisions regarding libraries. Society can afford the public mission and the democratic good that libraries can offer and we need to ensure that potential is preserved

The BBC News Web site had an interesting column by Bill Thompson yesterday titled “Open Societies need open systems.” The subtitle, “Openness, like democracy, must be constantly defended, says Bill Thompson” basically acts as a partial abstract as well. In this article he looks at Amazon’s disagreement with Macmillan that resulted in Amazon briefly de-listing all Macmillan stock and removing it from its indexes and the Apple/Adobe keruffle of Flash on the iPhone and soon to be released iPad.

I’m not quite sure how the Amazon/Macmillian dispute effects Democracy, or Openness for that matter, but it does go to show that highly successful retailers such as Amazon and Walmart can make it more or less difficult for a producer of a product to get it in the hands of consumer. Amazon, no doubt, felt that by trying to prevent different pricing for e-books it was helping the consumer (and thus it’s self) but obviously authors like Charlie Stross quoted in the article as saying “Amazon [has] screwed me, and I tend to take that personally, because they didn’t need to do that” saw it differently.

The Apple and Adobe situation I see differently, and while I do believe that while Apple is looking out for its own corporate interests, Apple also does want more Openness on the Web. As a company with a minority operating system share, the more open the Web is the better chance they have to compete. Adobe, on the other hand wants to, as Thompson puts it, “close off the web to non-Flash content.” While Apple, with its stance on DRM and other issues, has not always been a strong supporter of Openness, I believe in this case they are squarely on the side of Openness by support HTML5 and H.264 over continuing to enable the proprietary Adobe Flash format to be the de facto standard for video on the Web. Thus I find it a bit odd that Thompson appears to be supporting Adobe on this issue. Thompson says:

Just as we must work to retain our democratic forms of government in the face of adversity, so we must constantly be alert for those who would remove open systems in the name of efficiency and effectiveness.

He may be right that not installing Flash on the iPhone and iPad is in Apple’s best interest but I don’t see it as anti-Openness. Sometimes Openness and corporate interests can align, and I believe in this particular case Apple is on the side of Openness and Adobe is on the side of a closed, proprietary Web. At the very least, even if Apple is not a friend of Openness, neither is Adobe. Proprietary technologies and formats as de facto Web standards are a much greater threat to Openness than devices that don’t support them.

In looking at this issue from a Democracy 2.0 and access to information situation, libraries need to be aware of potential problems with proprietary formats and what devices can and will support them. If librarians believe that access to information is important for democracy, we need to make sure when we acquire (via licensing or purchasing) that the content is in a format that will be accessible to out patrons now and into the future.

Note: This is post is a modified version of a comment I originally posted on Carl Grant’s blog. If you already read it, move on. Nothing new to see here.

Carl Grant recently made a post about Balancing innovation and focus that had a huge bent towards the question of investing in Open Source Software (OSS)

I agree with Carl that many libraries could use more focus when implementing new technology but I strongly disagree that this is any different when it comes to OSS versus proprietary applications. None of his critique is specific to OSS and signally out of OSS to me is a bit of a non sequitur. Many proprietary applications, including some of Ex Libris’ offerings, need a great deal of customization and often just as much, if not more, staff to implement and maintain as Open Source. I was talking to a proprietary ILS administrator from another University last year and they have twice as many systems people working on their ILS then Georgia Pines had to original develop Evergreen. Another example about three years ago a University had four new job advertisements to help them implement a new proprietary discovery layer. People like David Walker have put into a lot of work implementing a custom interface on top of Metalib. Are these wasted, redundant efforts? Why is this different then focusing efforts on OSS? It’s not any different. Or if it is, one could argue that at least a library would have the software to change and modify like University of Rochester did with Dspace in creating IR+ which they couldn’t do if they put all their previous efforts into a proprietary product that ended up not suiting their needs. This is not an OSS issue, it is a technology issue and a management issue. It is just as easy to say that Ex Libris building Primo Central (or whatever product you want to name) is “redundant and poorly coordinated investments” considering other vendors are in this space.

Carl’s underlying point “that librarianship is in need of a clear definition of the future of the profession and to examine how technology (open source or proprietary) will move that definition to fruition and, at the same time, leverage librarianship” is well taking and I agree. Libraries should evaluate each technology acquisition carefully considering need, budget, skill level, mission, etc. This evaluation may or may not lead to an existing OSS or propitiatory solution, developing a new OSS or home-grown solution, partnering with a vendor on a new product (such as the URM development partners are doing with Ex Libris), or not implementing anything at all. But dividing the world between Open Source and proprietary applications only serves in muddying the water and weakening this message.

That’s a lot of text for a non sequitur, no?

In a campus IT meeting during a discussion about strategic planning one of the faculty members brought up the idea of a technology-free zone. Apparently he heard about some other college implementing such a thing. The committee decided to think about it and discuss it at a future meeting. I did think a campus-wide technology planning committee coming up with the idea of a technology-free zone a bit ironic. Anyway, I posted a brief tweet about this irony on facebook, twitter, and identi.ca and I got some good responses aboiut why this might be a good or bad idea. Dan Scott did point out we better “[g]et the level of technology right for those zones; otherwise, no clothes.” With that warning, lets look at technology-free zones when technolgy is defined to not include clothing.

After reading some comments (mostly on Facebook), I am thinking about this more. I did a quick Google search and when limited to .edu domains, it appears not many universities have such an area (I’m sure more than the few I found do, but they probably call it something different). I think if a campus is going to do this, a library makes a logical choice. Setting up such a zone shouldn’t cost too much money. Mostly some furniture: maybe with some comfy chairs and plants like the UW-Parkside Teaching and Learning Center? I think the bigger issues are 1) Space, and 2) Will they use it.

Space: I don’t know many libraries that have too much space. So, with limited space, is a technology-free zone a good use of space. That obviously would vary library-by-library and campus-by-campus.

Will they use it: On facebook I mentioned that none is forcing people to use technology and most libraries have quiet study areas. So, why make a technology-free zone? A former colleague mentioned that in most quiet areas there is still “residual noise” such as music from ear bugs and keyboard chatter. So really, a technology-free zone does offer something that a quiet study does not. That still doesn’t mean people would use it though.

Personally, I think if a library has a space it would be worth trying, or at least worth surveying students to see if they were interested. What’s the worse that can happen? No one comes, so after a year you re-purpose the space as a quiet study or group study or anything else. However, I’m not sure it would be worth trying this if it meant eliminating other spaces (such as quiet-study) or services. I say this mostly because with so much of of the information libraries are providing require technology to access, it could cause issues. Does anyone work in a library that has or had a technology-free zone? I’d love to hear how it worked.

I was debating whether or not to invest valuable time in reading the 2010 Horizon Report on emerging technologies in higher education until I found out it was on the agenda for an upcoming meeting of a campus IT committee I am a member of. Thus, my decision was made, I had to read it. So, read it I did. I’m guessing most everyone that is interested in the report has already at least read about it, but just in case, the six technologies they focused on this year were (time to adoption in parentheses):

1. Mobile Computing (1 year or less)
2. Open Content (1 year or less)
3. E-Books (2 to 3 years)
4. Simple Augmented Reality (2 to 3 years)
5. Gesture-based computing (4 to 5 years)
6. Visual Data Analysis (4 to 5 years)

While the report does list a lot of good reasons for these technologies in higher education, they do not focus on libraries. Instead of repeating or rebutting what they said for higher ed as a whole, lets look at this from the academic library perspective.

Mobile Computing: People who talk to me on a regular basis about library technology probably know I’m a bit of a detractor of this whole mobile computing bandwagon as it relates to libraries. Certainly there are some who think it is the next big thing, so maybe I’m wrong. Heck, there are whole conferences devoted to mobile computing in libraries. Basically, I see mobile computing as a time-limited market – especially when it comes to libraries. I do see a reason to make some of the core pages of the academic library Web site (hours, contact information, maybe the catalog) but I don’t see a need for special iPhone apps or anything like that. I heard Joshua Kim present a Webinar the other day and he said that the demand from students for mobile community has been highly over-estimated by many information technologists. I agree.

There are reasons to be skeptical. But even if I were less skeptical about students wanted to use the library from there phone while they were hiking, I think a bigger reason into to invest too heavily in this is that mobile devices keep on improving. By the time that there is 1) interest from users, and 2) applications that they want to use, the devices will basically be able to do anything a laptop can, so it won’t be necessary to design services for mobile computing. What is and will remain more important is to design Web-based services and resources using open standards and make sure that they are accessible and limit the sue of propitiatory formats and applications whenever possible. If this is done, the mobile problem will most likely take care of itself. HTML5 may help with this.

Open Content: What I found interesting about the 2010 Horizon Report’s section on Open Content is that they were focused mainly on open courses, and maybe to a lesser degree on open lectures. Here in the library-world we seem a bit more focused on open access journals. There has been a lot written about the latter from a library perspective, even something by me, so lets look at open courses from a library perspective. What does it mean? How should libraries be involved? I’m still trying to figure that out. Certainly librarians can create open “courses” on searching databases, evaluating resources, etc., but should libraries be involved in curating open course materials, entering them into the library catalog or discovery layer? I can see some strong benefits to this, but would faculty want us to be preserving materials? What about faculty that do this outside of official mechanisms? I don’t think there is any technical reason why libraries couldn’t be involved, but there may be policy and staffing issues. This is something that I think librarians need to keep on their radar screens.

E-books: It is interesting that the report said e-books are two to three years away while I know that many academic libraries have been providing access to e-books for a while. What was also interesting about the report was when they were provide examples about e-books and libraries they seemed to focus more on recreational reading than academic reading. Obviously e-books are here. What will it mean for libraries? I’m not sure longterm. One thing I am wondering is how the market will go? If we are purchasing e-books, from company X and they are hosting, what happens if they go out of business? What about privacy? E-books are here, but there are still a lot of policy and access issues to be addressed.

Simple Augmented Reality: I’m not really sure what role academic libraries can play here. We can make library tours, and maybe provide access to equipment, software, and/or space. But at this point I am having a hard time seeing where libraries fit in except on the fringes. That’s okay though, we don’t have to be involved with every new technology. That said, I’d be interested to see what library specific applications others see for augmented reality.

Gesture-based computing: Gesture-based computing is another one that I’m not sure where an academic library fits in. Like augmented reality, I can see libraries playing a role in provide equipment, software, and spaces, but library-focused uses are not as obvious to me. Maybe in four to five years they will be. I would say, the one technology in this area I’m interested is the newly announced Apple iPad. While multi-touch screens are not the end-all and be-all of gesture-based computing, they do have there place. It will be interesting to see if libraries look at innovative ways to use this product (and the competitors that are sure to come if it proves successful). Personally, I can see us lending these out instead of or in addition to laptops or netbooks, but library-specific applications for gesture-based computing seem less likely. However, what I can see happening is the development of gesture-based hardware and software designed to help those with disabilities. I think that is one area librarians should keep an eye on.

Visual Data Analysis: I think the area of large data sets is one area where academic libraries could play a large role in the future. Will they is another question. While there are some academic libraries involved with large data sets, I am not sure that librarian-involvement is wide spread. Large datasets are going to continue to both grow in size and number. Will libraries be involved with maintaining and preserving them? I would hope so. This would allow researchers to focus on there research and I believe that libraries have the knowledge and ethics of preserving information that they would be a good choice on campus to put this responsibility. Whether that will happen though is unclear. While libraries are a good choice to me, there are other campus entities that may also step up to the plate like campus computing or the division of research. Libraries need to keep vigilant about this field and any mid- to large-sized activity make sure that at least a few of the librarians are aware of the issues of preserving and maintaining datasets so that they can speak knowledgeable about the subject when approached. I am not sure if we have to lead the way, but we need to be prepared to be at the table and to offer ideas and solutions. As far as for visualized data analysis, I just see that as an outgrowth of data sets. Researchers need tools to access datasets. If libraries are involved with helping to preserve and maintain data, they will be involved with providing visualization tools and instruction

Today I was adding some files to our EPrints-based repository and was asked to assign a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0 license to them. By default, our repository various had Creative Commons licenses included, but they were neither the United States one, or 3.0 (they were 2.5). I figured this was just a matter of editing the phrases since I didn’t really want to have both the CC-NC-SA 3.0 US and the CC-NC-SA 2.5 licenses in the repository. However, it was a little more difficult then that. EPrints is, I think, a lot more powerful then sometimes it is credited for. Some of the power lies in the various format files.

After some searching on EPrints wiki and Google I couldn’t find out how to do this. This is when I turned to the all powerful grep command to search for phrases in files, and I was able to figure out which files contained the information I needed to change. It turns out there are a few different tasks that must be done and they may not be apparent at first. One of those files the contains information related to license information is a Namedset file. This file tells e-prints the codes to use for licenses. My original on looked like:

eprints@elekhasik:~$ more archives/binghamton/cfg/namedsets/licenses

# types for document licenses
cc_by_nd
cc_by
cc_by_nc
cc_by_nc_nd
cc_by_nc_sa
cc_by_sa
cc_public_domain
cc_gnu_gpl
cc_gnu_lgpl

To add a new document license type, all one needs to do is add a new code. Incidentally, the licenses appear in the E-prints editing pages in the ordered listed here. To make things easier on future depositors, instead of simply changing the cc_by_nc_sa license, I decided to make a new one called cc_binghamton. I did this so that people depositing things will know this is our libraries’ default license.

EPrints by default uses the installation-wide (versus repository based) system.xml file to translate the code to phrases for both the depository screens and public view. The two phrases that need to be read are the
licenses_typename_XXXX and licenses_description_XXXX phrases. However, E-prints comes with a warning saying “DON’T EDIT THESE FILES…. Editing the contents of this directory is not recommended.” Okay then, I’m not touching these then. Instead, anything in the system.xml file can be overridden by placing the phrases in any file located in the eprints3/archives/ARCHIVEID/cfg/lang/en/phrases directory. Not wanting to cross that warning, I did just that. While technically the phrases can be in any file, I decided to create a new file in that directory called zz_licenses.xml. The “zz” part tells me it is of my own creation and, if I recall correctly, the files are read in alphabetical order so, it gets processed at the end. As I mentioned, I added a new license called cc_binghamton. So, I needed to add entries for that. I also decided to update the CC-NC-SA to point to the 3.0 US version so I didn’t have to go back and change any previous submissions. I just followed the phrase format from the system.xml, changing the values. Besides properly adding the phrase ID, there is some file header information required. My resulting file looked like this:

<epp:phrases xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”
xmlns:epp=”http://eprints.org/ep3/phrase”
xmlns:epc=”http://eprints.org/ep3/control”>

<epp:phrase id=”licenses_typename_cc_by_nc_sa”>Creative Commons Non-commercial Attribution Share Alike
<epp:phrase id=”licenses_description_cc_by_nc_sa”><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/”>Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0
<epp:phrase id=”licenses_typename_cc_binghamton”>Binghamton Library Staff</epp:phrase>
<epp:phrase id=”licenses_description_cc_binghamton”><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/”>Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike US 3.0</a></epp:phrase>
</epp:phrases>

Note that because the description is the same, they will both look the same to the end-user.

Wait, your not done yet! If you added a new license type, you will need to reload your EPrints configuration and restart apache:

eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/epadmin reload ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ sudo apache2ctl restart

Also, you will need to at least generate new abstracts (or wait for cron to do it assuming you have it configured). I decided to create new abstracts, static pages, and views just to be safe although I am not sure that they are all required.

eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_static ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_views ARCHIVEID
eprints@elekhasik:~$ bin/generate_abstracts ARCHIVEID

That’s it. It is pretty simple once you know how to do it.

I finally had a chance to look over Marshall Breeding’s Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation. As Dan Scott mentions on his blog post In which I perceive that gossip is not science (and Breeding acknowledges in the comments), it is not scientific. I do think it is a little more than gossip… at least with vendors where the n → 50.

That said, one thing I do think is that comparing the numbers from one vendor or ILS to another doesn’t mean very much, For example, Apollo was rated very high, but the needs and expectations of someone running Apollo is much different from someone running Voyager or Aleph. In fact, they don’t even serve the same audiences as Apollo is marketed to small and medium public libraries while Voyager and Aleph is marketed more towards Academic, Special, and national libraries.

What I do find interesting is trends. While the people filling out the survey are not the same every year, it is interesting if one ILS or company’s score goes up or down. Being that I’m on the ELUNA Steering Committee and have worked with Aleph and Voyager more than any other ILS, I focused on the scores they received over the last three years. The three questions I looked at were:

• How satisfied is the library with your current Integrated Library System (ILS)?
• How satisfied is the library overall with the company from which you purchased your current ILS?
• How satisfied is this library with this company’s customer support services?

Breeding also asked “How likely is it that this library will purchase its next ILS from this company?” and about likelihood of migrating to an Open Source ILS, but I think there are many other factors in those questions that don’t reflect on the quality of the software or company providing support so I’m ignoring them. For example, Ex Libris is coming out with the URM. If I’m a smaller academic or special library, I may decide I do not want or need URM so I may go elsewhere if I were choosing an ILS no matter how much I like the company. Likewise, if Ex Libris is the only one in the URM market place when I’m looking at a new system, I may go with them even if I am happy with whatever company provides the ILS I’m currently using.

With three years of responses to look at, what is the trend for Ex Libris’ two ILSs? I’m happy to report, that over the last three years in every case (excepting one) the numbers improved. They might not have in regards to a statistical difference, but still that is a positive trend. The one case where it did go down was that Voyager users felt slightly less happy about Voyager in 2009 vs. 2008 (5.91 vs. 6.01). It was still higher than 2007 (5.53)). That is a relatively minor fluctuation and is within standard deviation. So overall, the trends for comparing Ex Libris with it’s self is positive.

On the Aleph side, Ex Libris had some pretty high jumps from 2008 to 2009. In fact from 2007 to 2009, the perception of customer support for Aleph went up over a point (4.87 to 5.90).

So while the scores for Aleph were generally in the middle tier, and by just looking at numbers, Breeding is correct that “Voyager did not fare quite as well on the survey” a look at the trends show Ex Libris in a more positive light.

That said, Dan Scott does have a good point that this is not science and gossip. But usually there is some truth in gossip.