Slashdot Mirror
Librarians Stake Their Future on OSS
Systems Librarian writes "Linux.com is running a story entitled 'Librarians stake their future on open source'. It details a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service that have developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run. The system is Evergreen. The element of this project that has the participants especially excited is the speed. Previously, if users wanted changes to their systems, they'd be put into an 'enhancement queue'. Now, some features are implemented overnight. From the article: 'In fact, the catalog has many features and innovations that are lacking in non-free systems. It does on-the-fly spellcheck and gives search suggestions and adds additional content, such as book covers, reviews, and excerpts. The Shelf Browser shows items ordered along a virtual shelf built out of the holdings of the entire system. Patrons can create bookbags, which are lists that contain a selected collection of annotated titles. Bookbags can be kept private or shared as a regular Web page or as Atom or RSS feeds.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Well, of course a group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service like open source!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
But I don't see those outfits whose clueless managers have taken juicy backhanders from Proprietary Systems®© producers for years making the switch. Do you?
The system appears to be pretty complex from the description above. If indeed, it's the group of librarians that developed it, they must be very very gifted. I am trying to see how any of the librarians at my former university would develop a system even half as complex. They did not seem to be all that IT savvy! And by the way, mine was a "prestigious" university in the USA.
But I guess the definition of "enterprise-class" is in itself, subjective.
The virtual shelf feature sounds great to me. There's nothing quite like finding the section of the library devoted to the topic you are interested in and browsing through the books. That experience is hard to duplicate on the electronic systems I've used. Now if they'd just add the content online....
Evergreen is available online, have a look yourself: here
(system seems a little slow already, hopefully this doesn't slashdot it).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Why? MySQL, in addition to its gotchas, recently quietly dropped support for distros other than Red Hat and SUSE. So Debian folks are currently out in the "cold", though I am sure these folks can make MySQL run on Debian.
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured. For some reason my local library uses Internet explorer and not Firefox on their computers designated for web access only. It's almost enough for me to try to get elected to the library district.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I thought that these were interesting items in their FAQ:
6. What license is this software going to be released under?
We are releasing this software under the GPL.
8. What core technologies are you utilizing?
* Database: Postgresql
* Logic/glue languages: C and Perl
* Webserver: Apache, mod_perl
* Server operating system: Linux
* Server hardware: x86-64
* Messaging core: Jabber
* Client side software: XUL
I was especially happily surprised to see jabber there. I have long thought that jabber is vastly underrated and under-used.
The entire FAQ is at:
http://www.open-ils.org/faq.html
why do all the neat websites require JavaScript?
I'm a college student and have been working part-time at a local library for the past few years to pay the bills.
:(
Our library consortium uses something called Polaris, by Gaylord Information Systems. It's among the worst pieces of software I have ever had the opportunity to use, and it is completely proprietary and Windows based. It's a pain in the ass to get anything done, and is missing several key features (such as customizable reports) that would make our lives much easier. Coming from a company called "Gaylord" what can we expect, eh?
Hopefully Evergreen gains enough steam to get our consortium to at least consider it, however considering that most of the IT people employed by the consortium can't even figure out how to manage Windows servers it's likely they'll opt for something easer for them to administrate.
The future of libraries (brick and mortal at least) is about as bright as most open source software.
Well, both look better than the future of your slashdot trolling career if that's the best you can do.
Seeing its almost impossible for online libraries to legally lend ebooks, I don't see brick & mortar libraries going anywhere anytime soon. As GPL (and other Open Source) software is vital to almost all aspects of the software industry, OSS isn't going anywhere either.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
These seems to me to be the perfect way for Open Source to make rapid progress and gain further acceptance. By targetting key industries that are only served by expensive software packages that are poorly supported or require expensive support contracts, Open Source can provide a obvious and undeniable cost and quality improvement over closed source software. This is doubly so for industries where the needs are well understood. In addition to library management software, I would suggest that class scheduling and enrollment/registration software might be another area. Universities and schools pay millions for this software, and it's usually pretty primative stuff. Inventory management and cash register software might be another area.
I'm a member of LASFS, this world's oldest SF club. We also have one of the three biggest publically available SF and Fantasy libraries on the West Coast. Our librarian has been looking for better software to help keep track of our collection, and I've just emailed him the link. Thanks, Slashdot for the info!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Successful projects need to be well-packaged in order to succeed, particularly complicated ones like Evergreen.
I don't see any RPM or Debian packages. Do they exist? Is there a ready-to-install image?
:) Nice assumption, but completely false considering I have and do contribute regularlly to OSS development. In fact, I've founded some fairly popular projects in my time as well. I just have my eyes wide open. Very few 'good' developers are willing to sacrifice their free time for the good will of mankind. When you're a teenager or even in your earlier twenties, all you want is to feed your ego. Later on you're more concerned with feeding yourself.
Ebooks distribution is still in its infancy. Give it time there, old timer. With regard to OSS. Indeed. It's not going anywhere. It's free, therefore it's going to sit here and fester for many generations to come. I guess to you the mere fact it's going to exist makes it's future bright.
Did you notice that the "Georgia Public Library Service" uses the acronym GPLS, is this a coincidence that it is like the plural form of GPL? I wonder if RMS has a library card there.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
...that the academia world is starting to use OSS as a production software, rather than just a 'research protoype' software. Another good example is the stunning calendar system developed by University of Nebraska Lincoln. And yes, it is nicely packaged using the PEAR package channel.
This statement comes contrary to fact. Most "OpenSource" projects aren't hobbies feeding ones ego, they are developed within company walls for paid salaries (read redhat).
Also check out Koha, which is going to be launched at the Meadville Public Library in PA early next year, and has been in place in a few libraries throughout the world. It runs natively on Linux... I've gotten it to run on my home box (I am currently doing archives work for a local organization) and I think it holds its own against Horizon, III, Aleph and the big boys of integrated library systems.
I wanted to try out Open-ILS/Evergreen, but had some issues getting it to run. Granted, I didn't try as hard as I did with Koha.
In terms of Linux in libraries, there are a few devoted people (and the numbers are growing) pushing for it. I swear, it can not be beat in the public computing arena.
An open ILS just makes sense. It is easily customized, cheaper in the long run, and really, all the ILS software is served through web pages now anyway. Why are libraries spending up to $10,000 a seat for this stuff? It's the learning curve. And FUD.
Libraries have had computerised inventory systems allowing people to check books in and out for an extremely long time. But they always use technology to fill a need. They don;t go overboard, and aren't fooled by hype from well dressed marketing people. They see technology as a tool and don't expect it to do more than it is designed to do. As a result, they tend to be pretty succesful.
Other government departments seem to do the exact opposite.
Perhaps we should get the nations librarians to run government IT departments.
I've been following this and other OSS ILS projects like Koha on and off for a while. I was working at City College of San Francisco on the student ID barcode project. That was mostly being driven by the CCSF Library. They hated the long lines every semester when students lined up to get their barcodes manually affixed to their ID cards so they could use the PCs in the library to check email and the like. My boss and I developed a way for the SCT Banner system to produce barcodes directly on student IDs.
In the process, my boss and I were made aware that the Library was planning to dump their ancient Dynix ILS and switch to a new one. I tried making a case that they would be better off spending the $100,000 budgeted for the new system on developing an OSS one (paying me to do it, of course!) which would give them more control over the result. So I researched a lot of the OSS ILS projects going on. Evergreen seemed very promising.
The CCSF Library ended up going with a proprietary system - and guess what? They got screwed at least partially. The company promised to integrate the library checkout counter portion of the system with the SCT Banner student database that CCSF uses. This was a requirement and the library put it in the contract. And sure enough, as soon as the money changed hands, the company reneged on the requirement (because integrating anything with Banner is not a trivial task). Some personnel from the CCSF ITS department had to devote considerable time to providing a work-around.
So I'm glad Georgia managed to get Evergreen out and it seems to be working well, at least from the initial reports. They also managed to get it working fairly quickly as large OSS projects go. I think they were only at it for a couple years. And ILS's are not trivial projects. There are library industry technical standards that have to be adhered to and the end user usability issues are enormous. The acquisitions side tends to be complex (especially on the magazine subscription side), and the MARC record standard is not a simple thing to translate into a relational database schema.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured."
And when there isn't, do you still worry? How do you sleep at night worrying about all that proprietary software out there being paid for with YOUR money? Tossing and turning. Stomach churning. Feet hurting.
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured.
This is irrelevant. There WAS no free, more secure, or full featured solution for library management.
Nevermind that most of the cost, at least initially and for the first few years, is NOT the software. About a decade ago when my school went to a computerized system, the cost was mostly in labor.
I don't recall how they managed to link barcodes to books; whether each book was pre-assigned a specific barcode, or barcodes were applied and the system brought into sync via hand entry.
This process took MONTHS and the work of several librarians and the expensive data-entry company.
I can imagine scenarios where you could get 2 dozen volunteers and go shelf by shelf through a library and catalog the collection, but it'd still be a massive undertaking, even for a small library such as one in a high school.
Your only hope is aggressive use of laptops on wireless with barcode scanners, and an ISBN lookup database you can pull, quickly verify the basics, and toss the book on the shelf again (in the proper order.)
Please help metamoderate.
Of course the gatekeepers would understand technology. Most do. e.g. Mainframe priesthood.
HTTP://WWW.NETLIBRARY.COM
oNLY PROBLEM IS THAT THE BOOKS ARE IN pdf WHICH MAKES THEM HARD TO "rEAD" LIKE THIS POST!
The key to a good Open Source setup is planning. You could use the code from the original article, or KOHA (which AFAIK also comes on a LiveCD which is a quick way to play with it). If you need to 'sell' the solution you could use the following arguments:
- higher stability (the original reason why (F)OSS gained prominence waaaay before desktops)
- lower maintenance: most Linux platforms measure uptimes in months, not days
- higher capital efficiency: you'll have more money available for customising (I once paid for two days of KOHA installation which was 5% of what a commercial system would have costed - it was worth just risking that money on a decent test)
- good development support - most (F)OSS authors are willing to sell you consulting on their code, especially if they're allowed to contribute it back to the community.
However - do NOT forget that someone needs to be around who knows Linux on a professional basis. A support contract, an inhouse member of staff, whatever - never run anything in production without clued up support. Sometimes, setting up that support framework takes the longest..
Good luck.
Insert
Right now I am completing a Masters of Information Studies (AKA Library Science AKA Information Science). Let me just say that, while not everyone has a computer or Internet culture background here, we do discuss Free Software quite a bit. And not only in our computer classes, but also classes like "Information and its Social Contexts."
While we might not all be programmers, many of us are staunch defenders of open access to all information, including software. We might not seem like FOSS zealots, but we can be, and I think from a different place than strict computer nerds. Part of the reason why I like studying here is because, unlike many other university departments, we are cognisant and critical of the changes that are happening, for both good and bad.
Wow! How dare they keep you from "borrowing"* copyrighted material.
*(+5:Underated)
My wife (a retired library science professor) wanted to do this 25 years ago. No one was interested.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
they were going to run everything on top of Ubuntu until it was discovered that a certain M. Shuttleworth did not return that copy of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" back in '89. If only he'd of used that $20 million to pay that stupid book fine instead of a weeks vacation in space!
load "$",8,1
for quite some time, i've been looking for a open source or cheap low-end library management system for my church's small library. something that would let people create an account, log in and then check out books themselves. (there's no librarian sitting there) Then, send them email reminders when a book is due. Other cool things would be: browse the collection on the library computer or online; if a book is checked out, you can send a message to whoever has it; reserve books online; book data input from Amazon or other sources. The dream solution would be if people could enter their own book/video/etc. collections that they are willing to share and those become extensions of the library. If you want an item from a private collection, email them and see if they can loan it to you (with checkout and reminders registered in the library computer, of course). The systems for "real" libraries like Koha and evergreen are overkill for something like this. Anybody know of anything close to this or at least could provide the first level of functionality (without the cool features)?
I'd love it if Cambridge Uni Library replaced their rubbish software with something like this, but can it scale to millions of books?
This sounds like a really fantastic, useful adoption of Open Source. Has anything else this useful in the real world been done with Open Source apart from, say, Apache?
... and then they built the supercollider.
The software used at the library is Evergreen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_(software)
from /Evergreen-ILS-1.0.1/Evergreen/src/extras/import/d rain-batgirl-charge.pl:
g irl.gsu.edu','miker','poopie');
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:database=reports;host=bat
They're also using PostgreSQL, as described in the FAQ, but the FAQ has no mention of MySQL. Someone should probably change the MySQL password on batgirl.gsu.edu, if they haven't already.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
Wow, just skimmed that site and played with the demo a bit and it looks pretty awesome. I used to do some tech work for a local library, and they used a management system from Follett, and had a massive upgrade from an older version to a newer version while I was there. Does Evergreen offer any sort of importing or upgrading from other management systems? This sound like it would be very beneficial to public libraries, especially if the regional co-ops/consortiums adopted it. But unless they can easily import their existing catalogs into the OSS software, they're probably not going to want to re-add and redo their existing setups altogether.
I find it very encouraging that education and oss are working hand in hand, because they are both heading toward the same goal of information.
-1 Wrong
Thanks for the correction. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have editors that, err, fact check..or grammar check.. or spell check.. so much could be avoided if they'd actually do the job that editors are supposed to do.
[insert witty comment here]
Uh, from reading the article, they built a software product on their own and decided to release it with a GPL license. Why does that mean they have staked their future on OSS? I havne't stake my future on OSS, but I have released code with a 'free to use however you want' license (really 'open' source) several times. A little bit of hyperbole perhaps?
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Well, they've also transitioned from their former (proprietary) system to said GPLed product. Considering the effort generally involved in switching from one system to another, especially on the scale they're running (statewide, ~250 libraries, ~8 million books) I'd say that 'staking their future' is a fairly accurate description.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
This is some bullshit.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
IMO this one case where the use of DRM is justified, as it is a lot more convenient to let an ebook expire than it is to take a physical book back to the library. Some DRMs are better than others, though. Mobipocket's DRM is fairly transparent, but the Adobe and WMA DRM are a major PITA.
In fact, I have it here on an FC6 system, and I've now installed about 10 more -dev packages, but still cannot make it compile. If anyone knows the correct syntax of what to launch to build it, and has a list of perl stuff it needs, I'd appreciate a hand.
--
Cheers, Gene
"If they can't do it right, then they shouldn't do it at all! And if that means nobody gets any digital content, well then let that just be a lesson on the evils of DRM."
Or a sad commentary on how a few bad apples ruin it for the rest of us. But that's not SC (Slashdot Correct).
The data would already be in a database, and that could be converted pretty easily.
You're assuming a)The data isn't in some horrid proprietary database (lot of them didn't even run DOS, and the system my high school had used serial terminals for everything) b)that the original authors of the software were good DBAs. c)That someone will work for free to do said conversion.
Please help metamoderate.
Funny you should mention Dynix. I don't know what their support is like in the USA, but their UK branch is pathetic...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
~8 million students and teachers at almost 20,000 institutions, including some pretty large ones like the Open University, UK, UCLA, NZVLE, etc.
Compares quite well on features and usability with the market leaders in a >1 billion $ market.
One could mention that mediawiki thing, also:0).
I would disagree with that reasoning because the changing from *any* large system to another is the only applicable place to apply "staking their future." It has nothing to do with either system being proprietary or not. If they'd transitioned from one closed system to another would the headling be accurate in saying "Librarians stake their future on "? I bet a ton of slashdot fanboys would have immediately started listing off the OSS projects that are in use around the world and how saying "Librarians" was misleading because it suggested numbers greater than the article actually mentions, et cetera, ad nauseum.
This is simply grandstanding by Linux news and I certainly don't think the people who implemented this ILS system would agree with the title. It is hypocritical because you certainly should admit that they'd object if someone treated a closed source usage the very same way.
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A million artifacts in the circulation database is not a large number for any modern relation database management system like postgresql or mysql. Evergreen uses postgresql and can handle that. A lot of the proprietary databases sellers do however try to create a fair amount of fear uncertainty and doubt in that regards. So that aspect of scalability is a non-issue.
A more relevant question is what kind of user load can it handle. I've seen proprietary integrated library systems which take about two minutes to answer a query when there are more than a half dozen users at the same time. Yeah. And that system was the latest and greatest and cost big bucks, too.
"Evergreen is still not on par with most top-tier commercial library systems; it still has several significant (and complex) modules to tackle that run the back room at the library"
Like what for example, do you have personal experience in implimenting Evergreen in a library.
was Re:Upgrading from other systems?
davecb5620@gmail.com
As it turns out many of these scheduling optimization problems are in the NP complete class of problems.
Scheduling is indeed in NP. But, the mathematics behind the scheduling and the interface are currently (generally speaking) both crap. I could do the mathematics -- probably map the problem into CPLEX which, while not free, is indeed considered much faster for nearly all LPs, ILPs, MILPs, etc than the open sourced flavors. Of course, being the good programmer I like to think I am, I'd write the set of functions that call CPLEX's APIs so that they could easily be swapped out for some other ILP solver.
Nevertheless, I've seen the front end of two different expensive commercially available course schedulers. They were crap, and there's no excuse for a crappy front end, because, contrary to popular belief, HCI is not NP.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Umm, dude -- you need to ask for help in the right forum. There are a few of us trying to nail down the installation instructions right now.
This is true, as far as the bibliographic information goes. There are lots of open-source packages for working with MARC records, like pymarc (Python) or File_MARC (PHP). But the rest of the system is proprietary: holdings records, (which copies do you hold, in which locations, and where is that copy currently - loaned out, lost, on reserve, etc), circulation records, user records, acquisitions records. Sure, it's all just a database schema mapping exercise, if your vendor's license allows you to touch that data directly. Sadly, the past generation of libraries seems to have accepted vendor lock-in as a matter of course; a mistake that we're paying for now and which led directly to the development of Evergreen.
Wow. This is just so wrong that I don't know where to begin. First, Voyager is far from the market leader (in either usable interfaces or in market share). See Second, the underlying database doesn't mean a thing if you aren't given the APIs to actually modify or extend your primary application, unless you're willing to reimplement the entire application -- in which case, why bother paying for a library system in the first place. And in most cases, when the vendor has made an API available, you have to pay extra fee per potential developer to receive the documentation and to be eligible for paid support for their API (which, of course, is an additional support fee over and above your standard support fees). Third, most librarians I know couldn't care less about what technology their system is built on. They're focused on providing the best possible service to their users. Over the past few years, the library community has started to realize that there are some pretty cool Web interfaces out there in the wild that their vendors aren't providing for us. So we've been going through exercises like NCSU's use of Endeca (on the proprietary side) and Koha, Evergreen, and WPopac (on the open-source side) to try and correct the situation. Librarians rock, you know.The hard part about running an ILS isn't getting it up and running, but maintaining it after technologies and patron needs have moved on. Evergreen is dependent on many different technologies. What if one of them quits being maintained? Even very popular technologies can be abandoned and there's no to predict what will still be used in 20 or more years.
Most of these ILS were state of the art at one time, but decisions made many years ago have limited what they can do now. Don't get me wrong. I am fascinated by Evergreen and may even contribute to it sometime. I think it's a great idea, and think they have made some innovative design choices (many of which are not discussed in the article)
But we need to honest about what's going on here. A handful of clever people have got a very basic system up. It has no acquisitions or serials modules -- i.e. the harder part to write which isn't visible to the public but which is critical for wide scale implementation. The project must move forward very carefully, or someone will wind up reverse engineering all this stuff later.
If you run a library, you have to KNOW you'll be able to run the system because your entire operation and years worth of data depend on it. Turnkey systems may have all kinds of problems and be expensive, but the problems can be solved with money. There may be librarians with very strong IT skills, but there are few enough of them that you can't count on being able to hire at least one of them.
Sounds like more an opinion than a 'fact'. I'd love to know what hard statistical backing you have. Please advise.
Of course, the nice thing with an open source ILS is that there is one problem that cannot be solved with money: if your vendor happens to go out of business, or decides to stop supporting your product, or decides to hike your fees immensely and you don't have a good means of exporting all of your data (including serials and acquisitions) to another system, then you're basically screwed. And given all of the consolidation and private equity investments going on in the library system vendor world at the moment, I'm not particularly confident about the viability of any of the current vendors. Open source at least gives you the assurance that you are not locked in with a given product; you own your data, and you can extend or enhance the system if you have the skills in-house or are willing to fund the skills.
And what makes more sense: having one hundred libraries paying $10K - $25K or more per year in basic support fees to vendors, or investing those same funds (or equivalent resources) towards a common library system that can be shared freely? Acquisitions and serials are tricky, sure, but you can make a lot of headway with that kind of common resource available. Hey, look: one institution has already joined GPLS to help develop an acquisitions module for Evergreen. And yes, the open source solution requires support resources: but proprietary solutions require support personnel as well... who, at least in the case of our library system, are each required to take a $3K training course to be certified as a system administrator, and have to take another $3K training course if they want to touch the API that the vendor has made available for the system.
Yes, really. I think its fair to say that this particular set of libraries (almost the entire set of libraries in the state of Georgia) has staked its future on an open-source library system: they're staking their future not just on the code they've developed and released to open source, but also on Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, SpiderMonkey, Mozilla/XUL, Jabber, lib-dbi / lib-dbd, and umpteen Perl modules. Take away the OSS pieces that make up that system, and you take away their ability to function as a library. So yes, their future within the state of Georgia depends on OSS.
But you're in the wrong domain. Fair elections will never happen as long as there are computers involved: the only way to run an election fairly is by using hand-counted, paper ballots.
An election is only fair if it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt to every participant that it is fair. In other words, there is a requirement for universal demonstrability of fairness. Since nobody can say whether or not something is fair unless they first understand it, there is also a requirement for universal comprehensibility. {My personal definition would be "nothing beyond the understanding of a school leaver with passing grades in all subjects", but that is a starting point for negotiation.} That pretty much rules out most electronic systems, and certainly any general-purpose device which can do more than one thing. You might get away with an electromechanical or pure-mechanical machine, if it can be made available for public scrutiny whenever not being used for elections.
However, the level of human scrutiny required is no less even for a well-designed machine-based system than for simple pencil/paper/drop-in-the-box/hand-count elections. In fact, most of the security of any electoral system relies ultimately on the diligence of scrutineers, whose task becomes simpler with decreasing sophistication of the election paraphernalia.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Thanks, I've been playing with the install.conf trying to make it make sense but still put the executables in /opt. But I haven't gotten it to build just yet.
--
Cheers, gene
Perhaps, but they have two developers who chose to use OSS to implement their ideas. If the state/federal governments for some reason suddenly mandated that OSS was not to be used in libraries, the exact same design could quite easily be replicated without using OSS. This is why they haven't "staked their future" on OSS. The have implemented the system using OSS, but it they haven't staked their future on it. Only companies and/or individuals who seek to profit from OSS have staked their futures on it, i.e. Red Hat, MySQL, et al.
From the article it doesn't even appear if they've modified any GPL'd code, simply using GPL'd tools and binaries, and releasing their own code under GPL. These are admirable things; however, again, it does not match the hyperbole that is suggested by the title.
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The idea that anyone can access the intellectual property of others without paying is just wrong. Librarians are pirates and thieves trying to rob poor starving artists and the hardworking publishing houses, recording companies, and movie studios. Libraries stop people from creating works of art by making them poor.
Who in their right mind is going to write a book knowing it might end up in a library?
I have been trying to get my "Linux In Libraries" project going for quite some time. I would love to see a truly open library from the public internet computers to the circulation system. I meet with resistance but I keep on keeping on.
:)
Right now I only have Firefox and Open Office on our public access Windows XP machines. I am in the process of installing Ubuntu Edgy onto a couple space computers. As the XP machines need to be serviced, I will be putting those spare machines out for them to use.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
I mean:-
Now if they would just OCR all the books, they could dispense with the actual "library" part - and save a chunk of cash on premises, and all that fire insurance! (plus we could search the text a hell of a lot faster
Disclaimer: I realise there are advantages to hard copy over reading off of a screen, and not just subjective ones either. This post is provided for your amusement only and should not be used to form part of any government decision making process.
Cheers (and a Merry Christmas)
Scoot.
About 20 years ago when the local library got computerized, they were pretty clever about it. They had the card catalog digitized, and then placed stacks of bar-code stickers next to the check-out desks. The stickers were just unique numbers, not linked to any book record at all. At first all the books were stickerless. But every time someone checked out a book, bringing it to the library assistant for checkout, the worker found the book's record in the database (pretty quickly, I recall). Then she (or he) plunked down a sticker on the back cover and scanned in the book, linking barcode and book-record. Of course, the next time the book was checked out, they just had to run the light-pen over the barcode. Over a matter of months they had all the popular books had their barcode stickers. I suppose during slack times at the library they put bar codes on the rest of the collection. I thought this was a clever way to amortize the effort of the data entry. The patrons, of course, did much of the work: they pulled the books off the shelf, and by definition they pulled the most popular works first. In this way the library was easily able to get the highest-circulating material into the system right away.
$META_SIG_JOKE
If it's either rootkit-infested crap or nothing, I'd rather have nothing in the library as far as copyrighted music goes. It's not the library's fault; it's te music publisher's fault. If they wanted to make it available only under a license that requires you to post your firstborn as collateral, or to reserve the right to root your box "just to make sure" you're not duping their precious, precious media, then it's their damn fault you can't find their precious, precious media in the library, not the library's fault.
Anybody know what library policies tend to be on lending out plain audio CDs, or DVDs? The libraries I've been to have signs and such making it clear that copyright infringement is illegal, but they don't actually seek to enforce the law themselves. (This was previously a problem when copying machines came around; every library I've been to has a sign on the copier requesting that the patron respect copyright, but it did not have some brownshirt looking over every patron's shoulder to make sure that they did. This was on purpose; they wouldn't have done it even if they did have the staff.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Can you offer some specifics? Our consortium has used Polaris for a number of years and we're very happy with it. There are things we wish it did, but it's been a solid product for us. The vendor has been pretty responsive, and the support has been top notch.
Are you sure you really use Polaris? They haven't called themselves Gaylord, or GIS Information Systems for a few years now. They split from Gaylord a while back, and are now called Polaris Library Systems.