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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.
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.
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
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.
For the eighty billionth time, MySQL runs and will continue to run fine on every distro, you just can't buy enterprise support from MySQL AB unless you are using Red Hat or SuSE .
[insert witty comment here]
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.
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!
That must have been uncomfortable for him....
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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!
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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.