A column in The Code4Lib Journal issue 5 2008 about the role of open source software in libraries and libraries failures in grasping the fundamental ideas of sharing and contributing in the FOSS -community, even among libraries themselves. A great essay w
5 minute lightning talks from Code4lib about a variety of subjects related to LIS and libraries. Includes links to lighning talks of 2006-2008. At a glance, most talks seem to be intruductions to existing web-services and technologies.
"Using the Crawford County Federated Library System's development of an open source web kiosk management system, as an example, this article will illustrate how an open source library project is defined, specified, written, tested and rolled out. The article will also discuss how the project was released as an Open Source project and future development of the project. The web kiosk project is called Libki and was written to authenticate users and allow access to the Internet kiosks based on time limits. Libki is a completely Open Source project and is now used by multiple libraries across the US. The client side of Libki is cross platform and supports multiple operating systems including Microsoft Windows and Linux. The administrative side of the program allows access to user logs, controls time and access and allows the librarian to log a patron off the system in real time. Libki was completely developed and written by staff members of the Crawford County Federated Library System."
When a library end-user searches the online catalogue for works by a particular author, he will typically get a long list that contains different translations and editions of all the books by that author, sorted by title or date of issue. As an attempt to make some order in this chaos, the Pode project has applied a method of automated FRBRizing based on the information contained in MARC records. The project has also experimented with RDF representation to demonstrate how an author's complete production can be presented as a short and lucid list of unique works, which can easily be browsed by their different expressions and manifestations. Furthermore, by linking instances in the dataset to matching or corresponding instances in external sets, the presentation has been enriched with additional information about authors and works.
"This group is for libraries - public, academic, school, law, what-have-you. It is not about code libraries.
Ask questions and/or tell us what your library or organization is up to."