The Earthbound Librarian

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Open Source
New England Library Association
Information Technology Section
Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston, MA
June 6, 2007

Well, that was my first time live-blogging a conference, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I frantically tried to transcribe as many of the speakers’ words and slides as I could (and I do tend to find such note-taking useful for my own comprehension and retention of what is being said). However, the knowledge that the presentations would soon be posted online led me to question the worth of what I was doing. I suppose there are two advantages to live-blogging: 1. timeliness and 2. capturing speakers’ words and interactions with the audience as well as their presentation materials. Theoretically, there is also 3. adding value through the blogger’s own mind-blowing insights. Truthfully, though, trying to get everything down didn’t leave much time for me to drop any pearls of wisdom in those transcripts.

I also found myself wondering whether speakers or associations have any issues with live blogging, and whether etiquette dictates asking first (I didn’t). Given that this was an open source software session, it would be ironic if objections were raised in this case. But some of your bigger and more proprietary organizations, like ACRL, charge big bucks for people to have access to the “virtual conference.” Hmm.

Anyhow. The program was fabulous, the venue was stunning, and the travel was exciting (big accident in the AM forced blind detour; rush home in afternoon to try to make a 5:00 dropoff at work was foiled by getting stuck behind a seemingly impaired driver in Belchertown).

Elizabeth Thomsen from NOBLE was, as always, insightful and entertaining. The woman could read the phone book aloud and still hold conference audiences enraptured. (Her content always trumps the phone book in a big way, though.) Today, she provided an overview of the history and philosophy of the open source software movement. She focused quite a bit on self-organized groups and online collaborative communities of various types. Her tales of participation in Wikipedia were especially revealing. Despite the common conception of Wikipedia as chaotic anarchy, Elizabeth called it “the most organized organization I’ve ever been a part of.” She closed by equating the fundamental missions of libraries and the Open Source movement: “freedom to read.” The looming possibility of Elizabeth spontaneously combusting [due to a gasoline pump mishap en route to conference] added even more intrigue to the presentation.

Randy Robertshaw from the Tyngsborough Public Library (whose presentation is already online, and in PDF!) opened the afternoon by providing some practical advice about how libraries might get started with open source. He proceeded to present several different applications of open source tools in his own library. What they’ve accomplished is extremely impressive. They run Linux on their public workstations through a vendor called Userful. Staff intervention in public computer matters has dwindled to practically nil, eliciting spontaneous cries of delight from his library’s employees. Some of the benefits he described were: built-in time management and privacy protection tools, easily-generated usage reports, the ability to post click-through policies, seamless print control, a firewall, and centralized control of all workstations. Another major application of open source software at Tyngsborough is Joomla, the content management system that powers their website. Randy provided some great background on evaluating and choosing a CMS, and gave some nice concrete examples of better living through content management (such as standards compliance and the ability to schedule website changes [and undo them] in advance).

Wes Hamilton from the Western Massachusetts Regional Library System (my region!) gave a comprehensive and engaging overview of flavors of GNU/Linux. He unleashed upon us this amazing chart of Linux distributions (or distros, as they say in the biz) which made my historical linguist’s heart flutter. (Stammbaum!) Wes took us on a tour of several facets of the Linux “how-to and can-do” community, including resources to support Linux use and resources based on Linux or LAMP. We looked at some code snippets from various products, written in different languages, and got to see the delivery slip router that Wes coded for WMRLS (or for you! if you email him) using 100% open-source tools. Wes ended by sharing with us two useful sites: the Linux Distribution Chooser, which helps people choose the distribution that best matches their needs (much like the WikiMatrix Wiki Choice Wizard); and osalt.com, which lets people search for open source alternatives to popular commercial software. Wes was a most engaging presenter, delightfully geeky and extremely sharp and knowledgeable.

The highlight of the day for me, though, was the first presenter: Joshua Ferraro of LibLime. Not to get all parochial here, but Joshua is the pride of Ludlow, Massachusetts, which means that 50% of today’s awesome presentations had roots in the western part of our great Commonwealth. But I digress… Joshua talked with us about open source integrated library systems, specifically Koha and Evergreen, and about his company, LibLime, which provides support and/or hosting for libraries who choose open source ILSs and can’t or don’t want to rely exclusively on in-house talent. The implementations of Koha that Joshua showed us were simply stunning. (Here’s one; here’s another, and another [in Turkish!]; and another [!!!]. You should leave this post and go play with them now. I’ll understand if you don’t come back.) Simple, elegant, intuitive interfaces; completely mind-blowingly sensible presentation of search results (their default ranking is field-weighted relevancy ranking, meaning that if you type “it” in the search box, Stephen King’s It is first in the results list–try that in *your* ILS! here’s what happens in mine); seamless integration of social and Web 2.0 applications; all created by a vibrant community motivated by the intrinsic rewards that Elizabeth had spoken of earlier in the day.

While drooling over Koha’s gorgeous interface, I couldn’t help thinking of the list of problems with our own OPAC that had recently been drawn up based on usability testing, and how just about every single one of those problems was a non-issue in Koha. The difference between this system, built on current technology and subject to a constant process of peer-review by virtue of being open source, and the bloated, convoluted OPACs that I’ve struggled to explain to patrons over the years, built on legacy code by people who have seemingly never set foot in a library or talked to an actual library user, was striking.

We didn’t get to see the staff or administrative side of Koha, as Joshua’s hour flew by and he graciously fielded tons of questions during his presentation. I’ll be watching closely as academic libraries start to adopt Koha (Joshua mentioned one consortium not far from us that is in the process of moving to Koha). It may be a sad commentary on my life that I could get such a giddying high from watching someone navigate through a beautiful, well-designed library catalog on a screen in front of a room full of people. But it was one of the single most exciting things I’ve seen in a while.

Even more exciting is the fact that Index Data, another major player in the open source ILS community, is working on a federated search tool, which holds much of the promise of products like Ex Libris Primo.

I came away from this session feeling that we are slowly moving toward a state of affairs that is actually viable for library users, and hoping fervently that users don’t jump ship in the meantime.

I had to dart out right at 3:30 to try to get back to work by 5, so I missed the end of the Q & A session, the beginning of which I blogged below. I did snap a few hasty photos of the beautiful Tower Botanic Garden while rushing to my car:

It was great to see so many old friends and meet some wonderful new people from the New England library community. Kudos to Kathy Lussier and everyone on the NELA-ILS team for putting together an amazing event.