Group items tagged

Find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software

Casey Bisson, with the help of Jessamyn West and Ryan Eby, reports on open-source software (OSS) and its use and importance in libraries in the third issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007.

KnowledgebasePublisher is an opensource knowledge base software, FAQ software, or just content manager about any other type of article that you want to publish on your website.

SourceForge.net is the world's largest Open Source software development web site. SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality. Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, on Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell if computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls, for example, or treating encrypted data as second class.

Choosing and Using Free and Open Source Software: A primer for nonprofits

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM.

We hope this site provides easier access to the world of OSS by providing some background and describing basic concepts about open source software.

the software has a small footprint and can run on a laptop, IBM has added incremental indexing, support for 200+ document types, support for 30 languages and linguistic features such as synonym detection, spelling correction, lemmatization, stemming and a "did you mean" feature that suggests alternative queries. The relevance ranking is adjustable. It does not rely on link analysis, which often fails inside the enterprise. Instead it uses OmniFind relevance ranking algorithms.Based on the Lucene open source search engine, the OmniFind Yahoo Edition goes beyond commodity search. It is certainly quick to install: Download it, configure it in three clicks and point it at a URL to crawl. However, it is also configurable and customizable. Administrators can change the look and feel of the search page, create shortcuts to other Web pages or best answers to a top query. Reporting tools monitor usage to determine null or frequent searches, and to gauge the effectiveness of the results being returned.

In this brief overview, I hope to illustrate some of the bstrategies and practices I've encountered in review writing--from my own experiences as a reviewer, from my students' questions and comments related to reviewing, and from several eminent voices in LIS who have written about reviewing--as well as what you can expect related to processes and communication between you and JWL. Review writing is one of the clearest examples of professional service within LIS, impacting continuing education activities, collection development decisions, and, indirectly, the surface of the publishing landscape for LIS serials, monographs, and software. There are, of course, individual benefits as well, but I'll get to those shortly. The discussion below is meant to illustrate several techniques that might be useful as you prepare your first few reviews, but with respect to any specific technique, your mileage may vary; feel free to adapt these suggestions to match your personal working and writing styles.

Beyond the fancy charts and deep insights that set some analytics programs apart from others, there are three distinct differences among them that every enterprise should consider. Those differences are based on where the software resides. And, in the end, you may find that using multiple tools can give you the best of all worlds.

Welcome to the CC LiveContent project! LiveContent is a LiveCD [1] full of a sampling of and links to free and open source creativity software and Creative Commons' licensed free and open content — audio, video, image, and text — for anyone to explore. Please use this disc if you are interested in trying free media and possibly want to create your own with tools like OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Gimp and more.

This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose.

Some information observers have suggested that Web 2.0's rise has been due to software applications, while it is becoming increasingly obvious to futurists that the Semantic Web will be defined by services. How those services will be developed and leveraged to bring order to the Web is central to our discussion of the Semantic Web. We discuss the broad implications of these issues through a lens of our work as library professionals, and the time we spend blogging about information on the Web, and its evolution.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), a method of connecting URIs in a meaningful way, is the key to making the Semantic Web possible.

On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.