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Don't ask generic nerds -- ask library nerds : code4lib . They have a pretty active mailing list.

Also, there's oss4lib which is specifically for open source software, but I haven't seen much activity on their list in a while, and I think most of us are on both lists. (there's also a few cataloging specific lists, but they get to be all library-sciencey, with discussions of RDA and FRBR and cataloging aggregates).

I'm surprised that there were quite a few programs not mentions on the DMS wikipedia page -- People might consider them to be more as repository software than DMS (or RMS), but some other ones to mention that would be useful to managing already existing documents:

• FedoraCommons
• DSpace

And if you're looking for librarians with an IT background, in the libraries they're called "Systems Librarians". You might also check out the oss4lib and code4lib communities.

True. But I see lots of folks at my university who are addicted to EndNote's buggy "Cite While You Write" functions that provide MS-Word integration. RefWorks has an analogous "Write while you cite" function, but still lots of people have accumulated libraries in EndNote and still have a love/hate addiction to CWYW.A lot of products provide "cite while you write"-like functionality. Zotero has CWYW-like functionality that can round-trip between MS Word and OO.o Writer. Bibus, another free/open source reference manager, also supports both word processors. Word processor support in other reference managers is detailed on Wikipedia.

Our library provides ISI Web of Science on-line....more open alternative will require freeing up all elements of the stack to include citation repositories.

Zotero plans to have a citation database that runs on a web server & plans to collaborate with the internet archive to provide storage of "open" publications (unfortunately, this excludes quite a bit of traditional content). Preprint/reprint servers, such as arXiv are a step in the right direction. Google scholar, PubMed Central, and other large repositories may help break the monopoly. If you'd like to help make your papers and citation information available to others, I encourage you to try out refbase or some other institutional repository software.

There are a wealth of APIs and standards to support this. I'm happy to say that refbase+zotero have adopted many of them. In addition to the citation style language, linked to above & which can create formatted citations form rich metadata, there is MODS XML, developed by the LoC, is a rich bibliographic format for exchange, unAPI makes it easy for websites to point to machine-readable metadata. SRW, also by the LoC, provides a uniform query language.

There are many places to follow this development, including OSS4lib, One Big Library, GCS-PCS, and many others.

I've worked IT at a Big-10 research library the past 7 years and GPL'd SourceForge project: http://libdata.sourceforge.net/. There's an excellent web site, dedicated to evangelizing open source software in libraries: http://oss4lib.org/. One progressive company that jumps to my mind in particular has bridged the open source paradigm with the basic necessity of earning an income. My hat goes off to these guys hailing from Denmark: http://www.indexdata.dk/.

That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.

One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.

I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.

The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?

I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own. :-)

Sure. Check out OSS4LIB for a list of different open-source library systems. On the smaller end of the scale, OpenBiblio, PhpMyLibrary, and Emilda get mentioned a fair bit.

The vast majority of the books I own have their Dewey number printed on the copyright page right along with date of publication and edition.

Those that don't, I can assign a Dewey number based on the subject matter. Hmm, math...500. Physics, 530. Here's a fairly nice breakdown you can use for just the main numbers.

Now your books are in order. Want to be able to look them up? Someone already suggested the card catalog--a tried and true old system. It works. Or, if you insist on using a computer system, how about one of the available free and/or open source solutions? There are many more available online if you search.

Jim

There is quite a large amount of open-source software available for library management. A full-blown ILS might be overkill for a personal collection, but I'd suggest checking out Koha and the listings at OSS4Lib.

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

• a library catalogue front end/OPAC
• a library system intranet
• a circulation tracking system
• an acquisitions/budgeting system

If so, go here for the Koha Integrated Library System - an open-source ILS used by several libraries in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Also go here for the Open Source For Libraries Web site which has links to numerous open source library systems and tools. Including a story on how Arizona State University West moved entirely to Linux as the underlying OS for their library.

Between those two sources, you should find plenty to check out.

There are a number of interesting Library projects using Linux. Beauregard Parish Public Library helped develop its own distro of linux called Whitebox . There's also oss4lib which focuses on Open Source Projects in libraries.

• oss4lib: Open Source Systems for Libraries
• Koha: Open Source Library System

There is a web site dedicated to Open Source Systems for Libraries

Say what you will about the ethical justification of copying other peoples music, but at least Napster has sparked off an impressive amount of innovative projects. Here is something I came across recently: Docster.

For the goatsex paranoid, here's a short abstract:

Imagine all the researchers you know, with a new bibliographic management tool that combined file storage with a napster-like communications protocol -- docster. Instead of just citations, docster also stores the files themselves and retains a connection between the citation metadata and each corresponding file. Somewhere in the ether is a docster server to which those researchers connect. They're reading one of their articles, and they find a new reference they want to pull up. What to do? Just query docster for it. Docster will figure out who else among those connected has a copy of that article, and if it's found, requests and saves a copy for our friendly researcher.

Of course, we cannot do this. Libraries depend too much on copyright to attack the system so directly. But what if we focused instead on altering the napster model enough to make it explicitly copyright-compliant? After all, many cases of one researcher giving another a copy of an article are a fair use of that article. Fair use provides us with this possibility and it's not a giant leap to argue that perhaps coordinated copying through such a centralized server could constitute fair use, especially if docster didn't compete with commercial interests.

Well, it's still a big leap, but think of the benefits. Say there's an article from 1973 that's suddenly all the rage. It doesn't exist online yet, so a patron request comes to you from some other library, and you've got the journal, so you fill the request. But forty-eight other researchers want that article too. If that first patron uses docster, any of those other folks also using docster can just grab the file from the first requestor. If others don't use docster, they can request a copy from their local libraries, who -- I hope -- do use docster. Nobody has to go scan that article again, and suddenly there is redundant digital storage.

Sounds good, no?

In a more general sense, copyright (and now license agreements) are to blame. There was a lot of talk in the "early days" about getting lots of stuff online, and it's slowly happening with, for example Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. But currently this is slow; OCR technology isn't good enough to process things without an editing pass, and sharing the original scans currently requires institutional resources. That, combined with the periodic extension of copyright terms to cover almost anything created in the 20th Century has put a damper on volunteer efforts.

One would think that libraries would be a great place to start with this at the institutional level. Even without scanning, a lot of recent journals come with electronic versions as part of the subscription. And they're bought and paid for, so copyright isn't an issue (as long as you belong to a subscribing library). But...restrictive license agreements to the rescue! This article on oss4lib describes a situation where librarians are required to scan paper copies of journals they have electronically for interlibrary loan purposes.

Fundamentally, the movement to put a fence around information and charge for every view is at odds with aim to preserve it. If we want hardcopy to be available electronically, or electronic documents to be preserved at all, we have to change the rules, or ignore them. In the meantime, start a private collection in the hope of publishing it someday. Historians will thank you.

In a more general sense, copyright (and now license agreements) are to blame. There was a lot of talk in the "early days" about getting lots of stuff online, and it's slowly happening with, for example Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. But currently this is slow; OCR technology isn't good enough to process things without an editing pass, and sharing the original scans currently requires institutional resources. That, combined with the periodic extension of copyright terms to cover almost anything created in the 20th Century has put a damper on volunteer efforts.

One would think that libraries would be a great place to start with this at the institutional level. Even without scanning, a lot of recent journals come with electronic versions as part of the subscription. And they're bought and paid for, so copyright isn't an issue (as long as you belong to a subscribing library). But...restrictive license agreements to the rescue! This article on oss4lib describes a situation where librarians are required to scan paper copies of journals they have electronically for interlibrary loan purposes.

Fundamentally, the movement to put a fence around information and charge for every view is at odds with aim to preserve it. If we want hardcopy to be available electronically, or electronic documents to be preserved at all, we have to change the rules, or ignore them. In the meantime, start a private collection in the hope of publishing it someday. Historians will thank you.