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Open Source CD Lending For Public Libraries?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the libraries-plus-plus dept.

phatlipmojo writes "Bob Kerr has taken what might well be an important step in getting open source software to the masses: donating CDs to public libraries for lending. It's a simple idea, but fraught with complications; indeed, at first, he couldn't give the CDs away to the wary libraries. Mr. Kerr dealt with the complications admirably, and has had a great deal of success getting open source CDs into lending libraries around his home country, as Mr. Kerr's howto PDF and this NewsForge article detail. What kinds of suggestions would Slashdotters make in addition to Mr. Kerr's to help make open source software on public library shelves a widespread reality?"

7 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. BYOCD by dolo666 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I suggest to Mr. Kerr, that he consider BYOCD (bring your own CD). Users could burn their own cdroms from a plethora of projects that meet a particular library criteria, for quality and safety.

    It might be smart for libraries to offer two methods for achieving this:

    1) Library burns cds on demand for a small fee.
    2) Users burn cds themselves.

    Having actual cdroms on a shelf for people to "check out", as it were, is likely a bad idea for a number of reasons. The large volume of cds occupying shelves would be a copy of the old library system, so it would likely be their default method, but it's incorrect, imho; it's a waste of space; it goes against the mighty electronic way. Burning on demand is the way to go because the open source community could ensure that the most recent versions of software are available, and that fresh new content would flow into libraries everywhere, rather than fill up shelves until the place has no more room.

    Stop gaps could be issued at the base system, to prevent abuse, and this would be much easier if the product was electronic.

    1. Re:BYOCD by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good idea. Provide a Linux-based machine with CD copying disabled, but with the ability to burn any of a number of on-disk ISO images. Stuff like KNOPPIX and Debian and the Gutenburg project. And anything else organizations feel like providing.

      You'd have to disable copying because the music and video industry wouldn't stand for it. They'll still send C&D letters even without copying enabled, but it would be easy to prove their worries groundless.

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    2. Re:BYOCD by eaolson · · Score: 5, Interesting
      You can't really be that dense, can you? To photocopy a book, at an average of 250 pages by $0.10 per page and 5 seconds to copy a page, you're looking at $25 and 20 minutes. You could go out and buy your own copy of most books for that price, and even if you choose to still copy the book you'll have a loose pile of paper with a good possibility of some unreadable portions due to the copier, not a bound and printed copy of the book.
      You're assuming that the book is available somewhere for a reasonable price. Sure, no one is going to copy a paperback of the latest Danielle Steele novel, but I've copied several scientific texts that were hard to get or out-of-print. It's basically how I got through graduate thermodynamics. For one old, fairly obscure book that my graduate advisor needed, he asked me to check it out of the library for him, "lose" it, and pay the fine so we could have a copy for the lab. This went against my sense of fair play, so I popped down to Kinko's, dupped it, bound it, and now everyone wins.

      The problem with the whole digital revolution is that it allows us to do things on a scale simply never possible before. Sure, it was technically illegal to dub tapes and give them to your friends, or to photocopy a recipe and send it to your mother, but it would never be worth prosecuting simply because of the difficulty in finding people, and the cost of prosecution for such a small return.

  2. Linux on Demand Kiosk w/ CD burner by ptelligence · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A project for your local Linux group: Take an old machine with a burner and donate a Linux kiosk to the library. Install enough hard drive space to hold ISOs of recent versions of the most popular distros. Make an intuitive menu for selecting a distribution to burn and then just have the user insert CDs after that. The library could sell blank CDs or users could bring their own..

  3. Re:A good plan. by GoofyBoy · · Score: 5, Funny

    OSS, the next AOL. :\

    --
    The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
  4. No thanks. by fuzzeli · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm the IT manager at a large public library, and I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot stack of catalog cards.

    We have almost completely stopped circulating CD-ROMs of any sort because the patrons have an expectation that the library will help them make it work, and if you mix initially lousy or just plain old software ("this storybook requires you to install quicktime 2.1") with who-knows-what the patron's got at home, it spells customer service disaster. No matter what kind of a disclaimer you put on it, circulating this kind of stuff would incur far more ill will from clueless patrons than it would benefit any unlikely geek who knows what they're doing but doesn't have access to sufficient bandwidth.

    However, I would happily offer burners for public use and make blank media (and our bandwidth) available. That way, they get to keep the disc. Or hand them out at intro to OSS classes. Or mirror some trees. But put them on the shelves? No way. On top of everything else, they'd be outdated before they even made it through cataloging.

    Nice idea though.

    1. Re:No thanks. by fuzzeli · · Score: 5, Informative

      IT gets involved when the circulation staff has a CD-ROM that the patron says is broken, and circ can't figure out what (nothing) is wrong with it, or irate patrons demand help and the call gets passed to us.

      While sticking to one's guns is of course possible, it's not good customer service to offer a product with a disclaimer or to turn away a patron in need of assistance. Sure, its par for the course in the commercial world, but we prefer to uphold a higher standard of service.

      And bestsellers aren't revised several times per week.

      What would be a far, far cooler idea (although not as cheap) would be to develop a kiosk that maintained its own local copies of many high-profile projects and allowed users to select from a menu what they wanted to burn to a blank they supplied. On-demand content, they get to keep it, and the kiosk could keep itself updated. All of the benefit, but none of the risk, unless of course someone manages to burn a disk on a day when a bug was in the tree. If the content is freely reproducible, why should they have to bring it back, or even worse... incur FINES! then it would no longer be free (as in beer).