eIFL-FOSS Blog

Koha and Eprints workshop, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia - report

(Guest blog post from Gantulga Lkhagva, Scientific Library of Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

With support from eIFL.net, the Mongolian Libraries Consortium organized a 3-day Koha ILS and Eprints IR training workshop (14-16th, October 2009) for IT engineers and librarians in the Mongolian library community.

During the first day of the workshop, IT engineers and participants were shown how to install an Ubuntu server and the Koha ILS from a CD as well as the management of Debian GNU/Linux.

During the second day workshop, librarians and participants were shown how to manage tha KOHA including the following modules:

Cataloging
Patrons
Acquisitions
Circulation
Tools
etc.

During the third day workshop, all of the participants attended for a workshop on Eprints IR management and its possibilities for libraries.

Participants in the workshop were from 26 different institutions including public library and university, academic etc.

(Additional photos from the workshop available here.)

Gantulga Lkhagva
Scientific Library of Mongolian Academy of Sciences
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Koha workshop, Mzuzu, Malawi - report

(Guest blog post report from Mzuzu University Library, Mzuzu, Malawi. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

This one day KOHA ILS workshop which took place on 16 October 2009 was a follow up to the Debian GNU/Linux workshop that was previously held on 4–7 August 2009 at the Mzuzu University. During the first workshop, participants were taught how to install KOHA from the Internet, and its management. Participants were also taught on how to install and manage Debian GNU/Linux as well as the basic Unix commands and MySQl database tools.

This follow-up workshop was an opportunity for participants to meet again and share their experiences.

Activities undertaken during the follow-up workshop:

Sharing KOHA installation experiences

It was noted that only three institutions who had attended the first workshop had attempted to install KOHA. The rest had not been able, allegedly due to lack of appropriate computers.
Installation Problems

We went through and discussed the problems encountered by those who had attempted the installation. It was noted that some did not manage to install KOHA largely due to slow and intermittent Internet connections.
Walk-through of KOHA Installation

We started a fresh installation of KOHA for the benefit of those who had forgotten some of the installation steps. Unfortunately we could not complete, again due to Internet outages.

Unix Revision

Participants were taken through a revision of the Unix commands which had been covered in the first workshop. Participant were also taught how to manage and manipulate file permissions in a Unix environment.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The following was recommended:

Participants were asked to try to convince their management to support the KOHA project in their institutions by providing them with appropriate computers.
Need to distribute copies of Debian and KOHA packages on DVDs/CDs for off-line installation. This is a good and simplified option for most of those with Internet problems and little Linux expertise.

Mzuzu University Library

Linux Administration (Debian) and MySQL workshop, Limuru, Kenya - report

(Guest blog post from Mrs. Rosemary Ndegwa, University Librarian, St. Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

With support from eIFL.net, St. Paul’s University, Limuru organized a 4-day training workshop (17-20th August 2009) for Systems Librarians in the Kenya Library and Information Services Consortium (KLISC) to enhance their IT skills. The training workshop covered essential aspects of administering a Debian GNU/Linux server such as; installation, files management, network setup, cronjobs management, backups, as well as an introduction to the MySQL database server.

Debian was chosen due to its stability and security, offering the preferred environment for installing FOSS ILS such as KOHA, which Bishop Okullu Memorial Library migrated to and which is gaining popularity in the KLISC.

The 12 participants, each representing a different university, appreciated the initiative, the opportunity and the timeliness to acquire these skills, which some said were “helpful” and “insightful”. St. Paul’s University Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Esther Mombo, presented the participants with Certificates.

The training workshop provided a rare forum for systems librarians, who came together in that capacity for the first time. They formed themselves into a group that would forge ahead together by organizing follow up workshops to sharpen their skills in the ever-changing IT environment. The group also agreed to offer support to each other in systems installation and trouble shooting as a way of encouraging the use of FOSS in the consortium.

Mrs. Rosemary Ndegwa
Limuru, Kenya

SPIP workshop, Bamako, Mali - report

(Guest blog post from Abdrahamane Anne of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako, Mali. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

Malian librarians learn how to use a FOSS content management system

As a continuation of the skills and tools workshop series, The Malian Library Consortium (COMBI) in partnership with the Malian Reseau Malian (REMADOC) and the Malian Linux User Group (AMULL) organized, from June 1st to June 5th 2009, a workshop on the SPIP content management system. The workshop was attended by 13 librarians from public, private, university libraries. During 5 days participants learned how to install and configure SPIP, create content, and customize the look and feel of a website. The goal was to teach participants how to use a Content Management System (CMS) for maintaining their institution website.

Web presence increases the visibility of information units and makes their services more accessible to potential users. However few Malian libraries have a web presence. In the Malian context, a librarian in charge of the website plays different roles : he is an application administrator, a content manager, and a webmaster. By the end of the workshop participants were expected to acquire the necessary skills to play all roles.

SPIP is one of the most popular content management systems in French speaking countries. It is a PHP/MySQL application that runs on different platforms. Like most CMS it has two interfaces : a private one and a public one. The private interface is used for administrative tasks ; content creation, organization and management and a public interface accessible to visitors. The objectives were to give the participants the skills to work with the private interface and customize the public side.

Many aspects and functionalities of the software were covered during the workshop. Participants learned how to structure and organize content using categories, how to create content, and manage images.

First of all trainees learned how to install and configure the software. Each participant had the opportunity to install on Ubuntu powered PC. Next participants learned how to structure and organize content using categories. Each participant used his information unit as a case study and created the different categories that are suitable for organizing content from his organization.

Step by step participants were taken through the content creation process. Each participant created different articles and at the same time learned about the content creation work flow and content life cycle. Participants also learned how to management images and include them into the website content.

Finally participants learned how to create templates. Templates control how content is being displayed and presented to visitors. Using SPIP templating language participants learned how to customize the look and feel of their website.

Trainers presented different websites powered with SPIP. They showed both the private interface and the public sides of these sites in order to illustrate how flexible SPIP can be in organizing content and customizing the website look and feel. The workshop consisted of different teaching methods. It was mainly hands on sessions. The trainer after giving instruction would take all participants through a process of accomplishing a particular task. Then each of them would be asked to repeat the actions on their own. Participants had the opportunity to discuss and share their experience about website creation management. Even though some of them had experience with website creation, few of then had used a content management system before.

The workshop was held at the Campus Numérique Francophone de Bamako, the local branch of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. CNFB expressed its willingness to assist the participants after the workshop and offered to host websites for those organizations which cannot afford the cost of hosting their website with commercial hosting companies.

Credits : I would like to thank Mohamed Diarra whose notes and initial report was partly used to draft this report.

Abdrahamane Anne
Bamako, Mali

eIFL-FOSS program changes

Just a brief post today to let you know about some changes in the eIFL-FOSS program. But the real news to take away is that, in effect, it is no change at all.

Over the past two years we have laid a solid foundation for community driven FOSS advocacy and support here with the eIFL-FOSS network. Volunteer FOSS country coordinators now represent nearly every participating consortium across eIFL.net. Together with a host of FOSS experts, software developers, and keen librarians, these country coordinators work together to promote the use of FOSS in libraries and engagement with FOSS development and support communities. That eIFL-FOSS community is the most important product of the eIFL-FOSS program.

We have undertaken exciting and challenging pilots of FOSS ILSs with a list of successes and an even longer list of learning points. We have helped initiate skills and tools workshops that have focused on the continuing professional development of library IT staff in numerous consortia. We have fostered engagement with the world-wide community developing FOSS products for libraries.

I am delighted to be relinquishing my post as Program Manager of eIFL-FOSS at this time confident that the goals and aims of the program will persist. If I have learned anything from FOSS development and support communities, it is that individuals come and go in the lifespan of a project but the code and, most importantly, the community remains. And in typical FOSS fashion, what we should do is simply press on and make it even better.

I wish eIFL.net and especially eIFL-FOSS long and continued success.

Randy Metcalfe
Program Manager - eIFL-FOSS

Debian GNU/Linux workshop, Mzuzu, Malawi - report

(Guest blog post from Mrs. Irene Sachs, Reader Services Librarian, Mzuzu University Library, Mzuzu, Malawi. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

The Malawi Library and Information Consortium (MALICO) organised a 4-day workshop on the installation and use of Debian GNU/Linux servers, which was held at Mzuzu University, Mzuzu, Malawi, from 4 to 7 August 2009. Debian GNU/Linux is the preferred deployment environment for Koha, the FOSS ILS that Mzuzu University Library has recently piloted and to which it has migrated. This workshop, therefore, served as both advanced training on Debian GNU/Linux for Mzuzu University Library staff as well as base level training for library IT staff across the MALICO consortium with the hope of facilitating future migrations of other libraries to the Koha ILS.

Participants in the workshop were drawn from 9 different institutions, most of whom requested that they be able to send two representatives to the training event due to the importance of Koha for the future development of libraries in Malawi.

In order to ensure that all participants were able to work with computers of sufficient capacity for the training, a number of computers from across the campus were relocated to the "American Corner", a computing resource centre adjacent to Mzuzu University Library.

At the conclusion of the workshop, all participants were presented with a Certificate of Completion by the Mzuzu University Librarian, Professor Joseph Uta.

At least two outcomes from the workshop are significant. First is the need for a follow-up day of trouble shooting for the participants who returned to their institutions and have been installing Debian GNU/Linux locally. Second is the need for a Debian GNU/Linux User Group within MALICO in order to ensure continued mutual support for these deployments.

Mrs. Irene Sachs
Reader Services Librarian
Mzuzu University Library

Joomla workshop, Dakar, Senegal - report

(Guest blog post from Mr.Youssoupha Gueye of Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

The the Consortium des Bibliothèues de l'Enseignement Supérieur du Sénégal (COBESS) organized a workshop of training on the administration and the use of content management system (CMS) Joomla from 13 till 17 July 2009 to the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar.

The opening ceremony was chaired by Mrs M.D. Diop, manager of the central library of the university Cheikh Anta Diop. An expert of Joomla and his assistant splendidly animated the workshop followed by 15 librarians belonging to 11 member establishments of our consortium and activists of the national association.

During five days of the program this later was developed by the trainers. On Monday there was an overview presentation of CMS Joomla, installation and configuration, introduction to the administration, the management of Joomla.

On Tuesday we made the creation of an arborescence for a Joomla site, the organization of the contents, the creation of the menus, the installation of a Joomla module, of a constituent and an installation of an extension.

The program of Wednesday concerned the creation, the installation and the use of a Joomla template, the advanced management of the users with Community Builder, and the safety, the maintenance and the protection of the reference data.

The use and the administration of constituents, the administration of newsletter, forum, safety of sites and maintenance of the Joomla CMS was for the program of Thursday.

We ended Friday by focusing on the protection of the common data, how to save a local database, how to save a database to your host, how to import data, the update of Joomla, the management of the numbers of version and the questions/answers.

It is with a lot of enthusiasm that the colleagues ended the training. CDs were given to the participants as well as certificates of participation by the President Mr. L. Ndoye.

[Additional photos from the event may be seen here.]

Mr.Youssoupha Gueye
Conservateur de la Médiathèque du CESTI
Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal

Evergreen workshop, Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe - report

(Guest blog post from Prince T. Choguya of the Chinhoyi University Library, Zimbabwe. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

The tools and skills Evergreen Library Management software was held for the first time in Zimbabwe at Chinhoyi University Library. It was the first ever workshop designed to promote the use of Evergreen Library Management Software in academic libraries in Zimbabwe. The workshop was coordinated under the Zimbabwe Universities Library Consortium (ZULC) by Mr. Prince Choguya, the Systems Librarian for Chinhoyi University. The workshop trainer was Mr. Ephraim Makeke from the Midlands State University in Zimbabwe who has had previous training on Evergreen on an International platform.

Twenty participants attended the workshop, mostly systems librarians at the various universities in Zimbabwe. The participants were housed at the University Hotel which was also responsible for all the meals. Participants arrived on Sunday the 19th of July 2009 a day in advance for the workshop. On the first day of the workshop, the trainer introduced participants to Ubuntu Linux software before proceeding on the presentation. The presentations were done using VMware images, i.e. virtual machines which allow you to interact with a completely separate operating system without affecting the installed operating system in a computer. The trainer went through explaining the basics on Evergreen and a detailed analysis of each and every module. The first day was mainly characterized by installation of Evergreen then data loading.Participants showed great enthusiasm by continuing to ask further questions. Each participant was given a separate desktop to work on so that performance evaluation would be made easier.

The trainer went on to demonstrate the circulation system, cataloguing and classification of records under Evergreen. A comparison of different circulation and cataloguing modules were made as participants were currently using different Library Management systems such as Mandarin, Technopak, and Innopak among others. The day ended on a discussion note as people posed different questions to the trainer and also shared ideas on cataloguing.

The next day was dedicated to bibliographic holdings management. Data entry on the main accounts created was the main activity in the morning. Participants were excited on how easy they could retrieve their stored data. Comparisons of different cataloguing principles and classification schemes were made. Bibliographic management on loans and other circulation concerns was examined. It was really an informative day as people began to fully grasp the concepts of Library management. Participants had to end a day on a happier note as the coordinator took them out to one of the local tourist attractions in Zimbabwe, the Chinhoyi caves. It is a very exciting tourist destination, participants maneuvered their way through the dark caves and took photos inside the majestic sites. The day was capped on a wining and dining note still at the caves before the university bus arrived around 7pm to take the participants back to the University hotel.

The third day concentrated on major re-caps of all the important issues. Participants asked all hanging questions and the trainer and other knowledgeable participants assisted in the answering of sticking points. A questionnaire was circulated around to gauge user responses, participants’ understanding and the general organization. It was discovered that over 85% of the users were now advocating for the adoption of Evergreen to their Libraries either to manage the entire centre or part of the collections. However, some of the participants explained that it was difficult to introduce Evergreen at their universities as they had already adopted other systems that were running well despite the cost, in their own words they said “we were preaching to the already converted” but however encouraged us to push the idea to local polytechnic colleges as less than 10% of them were automated and the bulk are still using the manual system.

The general remark from all the participants from all the participants was that the workshop was well organized and coordinated and they classified it as a success.

[Additional photos from the event may be seen here.]

Prince T. Choguya
Workshop Coordinator

PMB workshop, Bamako, Mali - report

(Guest blog post from Abdrahamane Anne of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako, Mali. This workshop was part of the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

"Yesterday,I tried to install PMB on my office desktop, but failed. The system was telling me that a file was missing," a participant at our recent PMB workshop told me just before we started a new day. It is a good indicator that some of the participants were already experimenting at their own libraries.

From 13 to 17 July 2009, 14 librarians from academic, scientific and public libraries from Bamako, Mali attended a workshop on the PMB library management system. The workshop was one of a series of three organized by the Malian Library Consortium (COMBI), the Malian Documentation Network (REMADOC) and the Malian Linux and Free Software Association (AMULL). The objective of the workshop was to show participants how to catalogue documents, register library users, and manage circulation using PMB.

During the 5 days of the workshop librarians went through installation, configuration, data entry and data migration. Every participant installed PMB several times. The goal of repeatedly going through installations was to be certain they can cross the installation barrier at their own library later. Since PMB is a PHP/MySQL application the installation process is different to what participants were used to and thus this required spending more time on it. They also learned how to uninstall the application.

Next they learned how to set parameters that are essential for using PMB such as library facilities, reading rooms, and reader categories. By the end of the day, the look and feel of PMB on each participant's machine was different. Everyone chose a style that pleased him. When a trainee asked, "Why am I not having that box on my screen?" another participant was able to give him the answer, "Because you've chosen a different style." It was a clear sign that the skills were beginning to sink in. Styles in PMB are what is referred as templates or themes in some applications. They determine the colour, the layout and how things are displayed on the screen.

When it came to bibliographic descriptions, I became the learner. "What information should go in this field?" At each of my questions the participants would have answers. Sometimes divergent but all correct. We also covered how to import marc records in the files. Little by little, we learned new things and people started aligning their priorities through specific questions. "Let's make certain we cover this aspect and that aspect, and then if we have time we can look at other functionalities," was the general opinion. All of them were interested in the data migration from CDS/ISIS, and some wanted to see how to create alerts.

Unfortunately the participants did not put into practice the migration process, but the process was clearly explained several times. "First of all you need to find the UNIMARC equivalent of your CDS/ISIS database fields. Secondly you create a file selection table to reformat your data. Next you export your data from CDS/ISIS using the file selection table. Then you use MARCEdit software to convert CDS/ISIS output file into UNIMARC. Finaly you import into PMB". I then showed them how to do it. This is one of the parts of the training that interests the librarians the most. More training needs to be done on this issue since many libraries have their bibliographic data in CDS/ISIS. We also covered during this workshop the management of periodicals, library user management and circulation management.

"I did not expect that we would be able to cover so many things in five days, I told my colleague who helped me with the logistics. I was impressed how interested and dedicated the participants were during this workshop. They were never late and were regularly asking questions and seeking clarifications. "I will need your assistance in that ISIS to PMB data migration. If we can get the data out of ISIS in the right form, many people will want to go with PMB. It has all the functionality we need in our libraries," one participant told me. "I will talk to my institution administration before I come back to you," another participant said. "Does it mean that if I have PMB on my desktop in the library, people can access it from their offices?," asked a participant. "This might have very positive effect on the library image within our organization," he added when I told him that his OPAC can be searched by the director from his office if the computers are networked.

To evaluate the workshop, each participant was asked to write down comments and impressions. The workshop was very much appreciated and interested all of them. They had a positive opinion about the trainer, even though he is sometimes fast. Almost all of them suggested to run another workshop on PMB to consolidate what has been seen and go into more advanced functionalities.

One week after the end of the workshop, I received an email from of the participants reporting problems she is encountering when she tried to install PMB at her institution. That is an indication that people are starting the use the new knowledge they've during the workshop. And also a sign that there is more work to do in the future.

Abdrahamane Anne
Bamako, Mali

PHP and MySQL workshop, Bamako, Mali - report

(Guest blog post from Abdrahamane Anne of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako, Mali. This is the first of the workshops to take place in the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

Behind the Scenes

From 18 May to 22 May 2009, COMBI, the Malian Library Consortium, organized its first capacity building workshop on FOSS for librarians. This was the first in a series of 3 workshops whose objectives are to give librarians the skills needed to maintain a web site using the SPIP content management system (CMS) and to manage a library using the PMB integrated library system (ILS). A prerequisite for these is knowledge of PHP and MySQL - hence the importance of this first workshop in the series. Sponsored by the eIFL-FOSS small grant Skills and Tools initiative, the workshop was organized in partnership with eIFL.net, Reseau Malien de Documentation pour le developpement (REMADOC), Association Malienne des utilisateurs de Linux, and the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, Bamako Office.

There were 16 people in the workshop (14 librarians and 2 IT persons) from public, academic and scientific libraries. The 5 day workshop programme covered HTML (1 day), MySQL (2 days), PHP (2 days).

In his introduction to the workshop, the trainer pointed out:
"You've certainly come across web pages whose filename extension is php. When you look at the source code though in your web browser, you see only html tags and content text. So you need to remember 3 things :

Your browser displays only html, so the server sends only html to your browser

To handle php files, on the server side you need 3 pieces of software 1) a mysql database server, 2) a php engine and 3) an Apache webserver . MySQL stores the data, Apache talks to the web browser, and PHP is the bridge between Apache and MySQL.

To develop php/mysql pages you need to know the following languages : HTML, PHP, SQL. SQL is used to save data or pull it out from the database, PHP is used to process data, and HTML is used to format and present data to visitors.

Here we are going to learn about each of these languages."

The workshop methodology had each participant using a computer running Ubuntu Linux. Participants used the Gnome Text Editor (gedit) for editing html and php files, and the shell terminal to connect to a MySQL database.

Instead of using slide presentations, the trainer distributed keynotes and a set of exercises consisting of different tasks to accomplish. A typical question from participants was, "Why is there no space between the last name and the first name?". This kind question arose several times. After successfully performing a task, participants were encouraged to try to move on to the next task or make the previous task more complicated. These questions illustrate that the participants were following and understanding what was being said and also that they are curious and want to learn more than what is being given.

We distributed a CD-ROM containing some useful software and documentation: WamServer, notepad++, Firefox, SPIP, and PMB.

During the workshop we took few minutes to present eIFL.net to the participants. While browsing through eIFL.net website we presented different eIFL.net programmes and activities. Special emphasis was put on eIFL-FOSS and the list of electronic resources in French.

"Five days are not enough," was the general remark during the debrief afterwards. That's true since we could not perform all planned tasks and exercises and were forced to adjust consequently. Even though some participants learnt more and understood better than others, all of them got the main point and now understand what is going on behind the scenes when we visit (or request) a php web page.

Abdrahamane Anne
Bamako, Mali

[editor - for an additional report on this workshop in French, see the following Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie page.]

The first Evergreen International Conference, 2009 Athens (USA) – report

The first Evergreen International Conference was held in Athens (USA) on May 20-22, 2009. I submitted a presentation “Evergreen in Armenia” and after acceptance of the paper by the Conference Organizing Committee, eIFL sponsored my trip and Conference participation.
More than 150 participants (most from USA and Canada) were attending this meeting, and according to overall impressions the Conference was a smashing success. Conference slides are available at: http://www.slideshare.net/evergreenils/slideshows

In 3 tracks: “Administrative”, “Technology”, and “Frontline Staff” during 2.5 Conference days discussions were held on coding, documentation efforts, Evergreen implementations, future plans and much more.

Bloggers were actively blogging about the Conference events. These interpretations are available from the Evergreen blogosphere: http://planet.evergreen-ils.org/

Some of my impressions:

More and more libraries (or library consortia) in USA and Canada are migrating to Evergreen, or have such plans for the near future. This shows that Evergreen is becoming a stable system, having good community support, and that the library administrators are confident that they wouldn’t stay alone after migration to this new product.
Inside of Evergreen community there is increasing understanding that one of the top priorities is becoming documentation efforts. During Conference a half day “Documentation” hackfest seminar was organized. It was decided that DocBook will be used for the Evergreen documentation development. This presentation under the name “Evergreen Docs Planning Session” is available from the Conference slides area (as above). Another presentation under the name “Evergreen Documentation Lightning Talk” is available from the same place. In the “Documentation” efforts eIFL FOSS coordinators can take active participation.
Growing interest from the Evergreen team on ILS implementations in eIFL countries. Here I see at least 2 reasons. eIFL countries are good places for piloting the system stability when working with non-Latin scripts and with different exchange formats. And also eIFL country librarians can help to have more active and wide spread user communities.
eIFL country FOSS and FOSS-ILS coordinators must start more active promotion of Evergreen in their countries. From my experience on using Evergreen I can state that this initiative will allow to:

prepare a new generation of systems librarians in our countries, well prepared to the growing demands of Knowledge based Societies;
use Evergreen in LIS faculties for educational purposes;
to avoid paying annual maintenance fees to the proprietary ILS vendors, and use already limited budgetary allocations more effectively.

For full program and event descriptions please visit: http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=eg09:main

Tigran Zargaryan

IST-AFRICA Conference 2009 - report

(Guest blog post from Ronald Munatsi, Coordinator, College & Research Librairies Consortium (CARLC), and Principal Librarian, Zimbabwe Parliament Library.)

FOSS – Ultimate solution for libraries in Africa

I had the privilege of attending this year's IST-Africa Conference in Kampala, Uganda from 4-8 May 2009 courtesy of eIFL.net. Supported by the European Commission under the Information Communication Technologies (ICT) Theme of FP7, IST-Africa 2009 was the fourth in an Annual Conference Series bringing together presenters and delegates from leading commercial, government & research organisations around the world, to bridge the Digital Divide by sharing knowledge, experience, lessons learnt and good practice. Presentations were on the following themes: Digital content and knowledge management, Technology Enhanced Learning, ICT Skills Development, ICT for eInclusion, eAccessibility, eInfrastructures, Networked Enterprise, eGovernment, and eHealth. I presented my paper under the Digital Content theme titled “Towards Cohesive Consortia Organisation and Smart Partnerships: Enabling Sustainable Access and Effective Utilisation of e-Resources in Academic and Research Libraries in Zimbabwe.”

Here I will focus on the FOSS aspects of the event. Presentations on FOSS ranged from Open Source Community Organization, to Using FOSS as a tool for development, to the Value of FOSS to academic and business models among others. These and other full-text papers presented during the conference will be available for down download from the IST-Africa portal paper repository. During FOSS discourses, it was unequivocal that FOSS applications particularly in libraries in transitional countries was the ultimate solution in narrowing the digital divide.

There was serious lobbying and advocacy for use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as opposed to proprietary software and it was heartening to observe that eIFL-FOSS and eIFL-OA initiatives in this regard were noted in some discussions. Such FOSS applications as Greenstone, KOHA, ABCD were given as viable solutions. Another notable observation was the trend towards social networking tools that allow collaborative content generation and management epitomised in library 2.0 (Web 2.0) services as these bring immense benefits to the library and the consumers of information resources. These gains include researchers benefiting from collaborative peer-generated scientific research content which in turn adds value to online information resources. Librarians at the same time profit from rich collaborative cataloguing and metadata management among a host of other benefits but underpinning all this is a user-driven transformation of library services.

It is in this regard that I want to urge the eIFL-FOSS and eIFL-OA community to start seriously considering the use of these library 2.0 tools for example blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, twitters, mashups, social tagging, taxonomies among a host of other social media. Incidentally, the next IST-Africa conference (2010) will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. It will be focusing on the following thematic priorities:

Open Source Software – Applications
Digital libraries and Intelligent Content
Technology enhanced Learning & ICT skills
ICT for eInclusion and eAccessibility
ICT for environmental sustaibability
eGovernment – Services to Citizens & Business
eHealth – Health Information Systems

Prior to the IST-Africa Conference for 2010, there will be an e-skills summit again in Cape Town (11-14 August 2010) and this will include plenary sessions on the preparatory process, academic and case study papers, e-skills exposition to display and demonstrate e-skills applications and a program of latest approaches to e-skills. I am sure this can also be another opportunity to showcase and demonstrate such innovations as Greenstone including other initiatives for example integrating Greenstone with other systems like KOHA, ABCD social media and other tools.

Ronald Munatsi
Coordinator, College & Research Librairies Consortium (CARLC)
Principal Librarian
Zimbabwe Parliament Library

Evergreen Training for Ilia Chavchavadze State University Library Staff

The Fundamental Scientific Library (FSL) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Armenia is actively involved in implementing the Evergreen FOSS ILS in the NAS institution libraries and in advocating the system amongst the librarians from the developing countries. During April 6-7 Ilia Chavchavadze State University (Tbilsi, Georgia) library director Natia Gabrichidze and two IT specialists David and Levani visited FSL for a two-day training workshop on Evergreen futures.

Although Georgian librarians have already installed and are working with the Evergreen, they decided to visit their Armenian colleagues for an exchange of knowledge and skills. During training, 3 main topics were covered: Evergreen installation; Evergreen administration; cataloging.

Both sides were satisfied with the results of the visit and the outcomes of the training. Since both institutions are also partnering in the EU funded 3 year Tempus project, New Masters Program on Library and Information Science, it was decided to continue joint activities and efforts on implementing and introducing Evergreen to library staff and LIS students in a range of Tempus project activities.

During 2008 FSL has hosted training for the librarians and IT specialists from developing countries on Evergreen and Koha systems as part of the eIFL-FOSS ILS Project.

Tigran Zargaryan

Ada Lovelace Day - Bess Sadler

The purpose of Ada Lovelace Day - 24 March 2009 - is to draw attention to women excelling in technology. To do that thousands of people today are blogging about a woman in technology whom they admire. I have a very long list of women working in technology that I admire, but today, on this first Ada Lovelace Day, I have chosen to write about Bess Sadler, Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia.

I first met Bess in October 2006 in Italy at a meeting at Eremo organised by eIFL.net. Both Bess and eIFL.net were new to me as was the surprisingly full extent of FOSS in libraries. At this meeting we were mapping out what might be involved in setting up a FOSS program for eIFL.net. Bess may have been new to me, but she was already well-known in the FOSS for libraries scene both as a developer and a keen code4libber. Her enthusiasm and knowledge of free and open source software were infectious. What's not to admire?

These days I spend my time shepherding the eIFL-FOSS program and when I look back and ask myself what led me here the answer is easy: Bess Sadler. She remains an inspiration.

Amongst her many activities these days, you will find Bess actively engaged in FOSS development with Blacklight, an open source OPAC. You can follow here blog here.

What woman in technology do you admire? Why not take up the Ada Lovelace Day challenge and tell someone about her.

Note: the photo of Bess is used under a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 Generic licence and is available here.

LTSP in Bamako, Mali

Recently I was in Bamako, Mali, visiting the ever impressive Abdrahamane Anne at the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako. The purpose of my visit was to gather information for a case study on the Koha ILS pilot work that Anne, as he is known, is leading there. I spent two full days with Anne as he walked me through his methodology for exporting and migrating their catalogue data which is currently held in a non-standard CDS/ISIS database. Anne's solutions to a variety of tricky problems to get the data into standard UNIMARC format for importing into Koha were a delight to see. But this post is about something apparently only tangentially related to the eIFL-FOSS ILS project.

The Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry at the University of Bamako is not presently blessed with an abundance of network connectivity. There are (or were) no public access machines with which researchers might query their legacy CDS/ISIS database. A traditional card catalogue is the primary search tool that students use, unless they wish to request a specific computer search to be undertaken by one of the 3 library staff who share an office. But all that is about to change.

Through the kind offices of a colleague in France, Anne has come into possession of a number of near-obsolete computers. Obsolete, at least, in terms of the environment in which they were originally located. But here, where resources are a bit thinner on the ground, these machines will soon to be turned into viable public access machines for users of the library. And the path to this lay in a FOSS solution implemented at Birzeit University: LTSP, which stands for the Linux Terminal Server Project.

Anne had read about the work of Dr. Wasel Ghanem, head of the Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering department at Birzeit University through the eIFL.net spotlight article. Once he had those machines arrive from France he could seriously contemplate doing something with them. It did not take long for me to connect Anne and Dr. Ghanem. And that connection is already bearing fruit.

I heard from Anne last week with news that he has successfully implemented his LTSP installation. He is using a set of Pentium III machines as his thin clients and a Pentium IV as his LTSP server. All that is left now is to gather sufficient network and electrical cables and his library will have public access machines available for its users.

And what exactly will these machines be accessing? They won't be accessing the Internet, at least not for the foreseeable future. What they will be accessing is the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry's new Koha OPAC (Online public access catalogue). What started as a project to introduce a full-fledged FOSS integrated library system to this library has grown into the target of a new LTSP installation that will transform the users' interaction with the resources in the library.

One FOSS project connecting to another FOSS project building a new FOSS-enabled future. Yeah, that sounds about right to me.

Webinars - the new virtual classroom?

Yesterday I participated in my very first webinar. Webinars are a type of web conference where one person (possibly with a small team of helpers) is presenting on a topic to a large but self-selecting group (registration is usually involved in order to participate in a webinar). The presenter usually is running a slideshow of some kind with verbal commentary. The participants may patiently and passively take in the presentation or get involved directly by asking questions orally (if their microphone is unmuted) or through a question text chat window. Most webinar facilities provide for recording of the session by the organiser. And that's exactly what happened during Karen Schneider's webinar entitled Understanding Open Source.

Karen's webinar was a gentle introduction to what open source software is and why it is important for libraries. There were 64 people attending the webinar presentation most of whom, I would guess, were new to open source. The atmosphere was very friendly (all due to Karen) and that encouraged questions both directly and through the question text window. I found the questions asked to all be sensible, probably a sign that this webinar had found the audience for which it was intended.

I had intended to merely be a spectator at this webinar. But when the numbers of participants grew to a substantial size well in advance, Karen posted a request on the Evergreen general discussion email list for volunteers to help with the webinar. So I volunteered.

Helping out meant that my status was changed when I logged in from participant to one of the organisers in the webinar. Thus I was able to see more and do more than a typical participant. For example, I was able to mute or unmute the microphones of other participants. I was able to directly answer questions in the question chat window. I had other powers as well, but those were the ones employed during the 1 hour presentation.

I would have been happy to leave it at that and just help out in the background, but Karen kindly solicited input from her two "wingmen", myself and Jason Etheridge, during her talk. So if you go to the recording published on the Evergreen blog and listen to it all the way through you will periodically hear my sonorous tones.

Participating in a webinar was lots of fun. It didn't take more time than the hour advertised for the talk, and I didn't have to get on a plane and travel for 8 hours in order to hear Karen speak. I imagine that all of the librarians participating in the webinar were also sitting at their desks in their libraries. Which brought a wonderful image to my mind of librarians across North America all focusing their attention on free and open source software at the same time :-)

That's what I'd like to see happen across the eIFL.net countries as well. Maybe webinars will be the way forward.

Meeting the FOSS challenge in Kathmandu

Recently I spent a couple days in Kathmandu, Nepal, visiting the team of library IT professionals at Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) which is conducting one of the pilots for the eIFL-FOSS ILS project. Dibyendra Hyoju is the technical lead on this Evergreen pilot with Amar Gurung, his Director as well as eIFL-FOSS country coordinator, providing careful oversight. A case study of this pilot will follow in due course, but here I just want to reflect for a moment or two on what admirable work is going on in Nepal.

You will not be surprised to learn that FOSS is alive and well in Nepal. Nepal has its own local variant of Linux, NepaLinux, and its own contribution to UNICODE. So you will also not be surprised to learn that FOSS for libraries is busy being explored, evaluated and deployed. Quite apart from the eIFL-FOSS ILS Evergreen pilot, there are substantial deployments of Koha, Greenstone, and OpenBiblio, as well as ongoing evaluations of DSpace repository software. At a workshop hosted by the Social Science Baha, I was impressed with the level of technical expertise as well as non-technical librarian enthusiasm for onward development. My co-presenters, Dibyendra Hyoju and Dr Mohan Raj Pradhan of HealthNet presented a strong case, I think, for FOSS in libraries.

What is perhaps even more impressive is that all of this great work is going on in spite of very real challenges. For example, there is no electricity in Kathmandu for 16 hours per day. That's a bit hard to get your head around at first. Only 8 hours of electricity. Of course that limited amount is extended somewhat by the vast number of private generators that kick in to action when the main power is shut off. But those generators cost money. So it is usually only businesses and the wealthy that can afford them. Even my hotel only provided electricity for a few more hours than the minimum.

How do such conditions affect the work of librarians and IT staff? Well, this is Nepal so people do cope. They develop workarounds. They make sure that computer servers are shut down cleanly prior to the loss of power. They concentrate their efforts during the window of opportunity when there is reliable power. And they are patient.

For those who do things with software, the somewhat geeky amongst us, it means the absence of late night techniness. I can attest that much of the best techie thinking often happens after midnight in the wee hours of the morning when a thorny problem just keeps gnawing at your brain demanding that you solve it. But that can't happen here. It's a little thing, I know. But it really hit home to me in the middle of night while I was sitting in my hotel room in Kathmandu in the dark with only the flickering of my battery-powered laptop screen to keep me company.

The differing challenges we face locally, however, have a way of strengthening the bonds we share. Free and open source software, and especially the FOSS communities that are built on sharing and caring, is one of the things we share. Long may it flourish in Nepal.

My visit was all too brief and yet I saw so much in this beautiful city. I only hope that some day I can return and visit the city and the country at a more leisurely pace.

The Square of Engagement

Recently I was thinking about institutional engagement with free and open source software (FOSS). I had been asked to open a day-long workshop on the relevance of a FOSS integrated library system (ILS) for academic libraries. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that libraries have a vast array of FOSS they are busy deploying. Everything from Apache web servers, to Drupal content management systems (CMS), to institutional repository (IR) packages. Yet as much I would like for us each to have an infinite amount of time and energy to spare on our passions, I am reconciled to the fact that we need to make choices. Hard choices. Choices about our level of engagement with the software we deploy.

A choice matrix is often elaborated in terms of a "square of priorities". This will be familiar to you if you have ever had cause to work on time management issues. One axis shows the level of importance increasing, and the other axis shows the level of urgency increasing. This quickly resolves into 4 key areas against which your tasks may be plotted: those which are not urgent and also not important; those which are urgent but not important; those which are important but not urgent; and those which are both important and urgent. Plotting your current task list helps reveal whether you are spending too much time in the wrong box and may prompt a revision for the future.

I think a very similar story can be told about the "square of engagement". Libraries use a large number of FOSS applications. But do they need to engage with the ongoing development and user communities for each of these? Would that be a wise use of their time and energy?

The answer is obvious once you start plotting where each FOSS application in use in the library would sit on the square of engagement. Do systems librarians need to spend time and energy working on the ongoing development of the Apache web server? It is clearly used constantly in any library that has an OPAC or even just a website. But it probably does not call for a large amount of librarian engagement. What about a CMS such as Drupal? Many libraries shape their whole online presence around the capabilities of their CMS. So they need to stay on top of those capabilities in order to know what options they have available. They may have someone monitoring the Drupal user discussion list. But they may not be getting in to the code. Your CMS therefore may be slightly up the scale of engagement but still well below the mid-point on that scale.

There are also FOSS applications that individual libraries with systems development personnel will engage with at a very high level, not least because they may be the lead developers of this software. Here the level of engagement outstrips the use within that library, either because this is solely a development project and not in official supported use in the library, or because the use of this application by others is so large that the project has effectively become independent of the overall priority matrix of the library.

But which FOSS packages then do call for serious and sustained engagement by libraries? And should I feel uneasy if my library is not engaged fully with these, or cannot be? The latter question is very important, but let's come back to it at the end.

Clearly libraries will want to expend their limited time and energy engaging seriously with FOSS applications that are central to their mission. Engagement here does not mean that they are or will become key developers of the software. But it does entail a level of involvement that goes significantly beyond mere use. It suggests that staff will be encouraged to actually participate on the user email discussion lists. Not merely to ask questions for themselves, but also to answer the questions that other librarians struggling with the software have posed. It suggests a level of awareness of the ongoing development roadmap for the software, and the potential, certainly, to express preferences for what you would most like to see happen there. At some point it may even include submission of "bug" notices to the development team, and ideally the offer of code "patches" to address such bugs. And through all of this you will be thinking that this sounds just like robust participation in a whole complex support network for this software. It is.

The ILS is still today the cornerstone of a library. It seems only right that an institution should acknowledge this by sanctioning as much engagement with the project as can be sustained.

But what if my library doesn't have a large pool of talented software developers? What if my resources are as limited as can be? How can I ever truly engage with such software? And am I failing by not doing so?

I noted somewhere near the beginning of this reflection the sad truth that we are blessed with only a finite amount of time and energy to commit to our passions. The quantity may vary. And this may determine much. For example, it may very well be that your only viable option is to accept a "hosted" ILS solution. Not much room for engagement there, right? Not really that much different than your engagement level with your Apache web server, right? Wrong. Because your engagement marks out where your passion lies. And if it lies with your ILS, then even in the case where you have no real technical involvement with the software, you will still have opportunities to demonstrate your passion, your commitment, and your desires.

I think this is most important thing I have learned in thinking through the square of engagement. It is the realisation that engagement is an expression of commitment and not a quantity of commitment. With that observation, I think the square of engagement can be used effectively by any library thinking through its involvement with various FOSS applications. And just as the square of priorities can be a tool for reforming our work practices, so too can the square of engagement be a tool for reforming how, as institutions, we evaluate the relevance of a FOSS solution for our libraries.

Documentation: not just another pretty face

I have always thought that documentation was a vital component of any FOSS project. But recently the value of documentation was illuminated for me in a new way. This has me rethinking the basis of the importance of documentation for a FOSS project at nearly any stage of development.

Let me describe the case that prompts this reflection. A long-term (2 to 3 year) user of an enterprise software deployment recently announced, with regret, on a user/developer list for that software that the decision had been made to migrate to an alternate enterprise software solution. The reason given was that the documentation of the software currently in use was not comparable in quality or comprehensiveness to its competitor. Both, clearly, met other technical functional requirements for this user. But the discrepancy in the documentation was a deciding factor in the decision to migrate away.

What struck me was that this user was willing to accept the change cost of an enterprise level migration because of documentation.

That is remarkable. And it speaks volumes about the value of documentation.

Documentation - it's quality, comprehensiveness, easy of use (for different audiences), and coherence - is a key criteria I would use for determining whether to choose any enterprise software solution. It is, I would argue, part of the functional aspect of enterprise software deployment. And here I make no distinction between proprietary or FOSS alternatives; in either case solid documentation is not just window dressing, it is an integral part of the package you are selecting.

Software that isn't merely for my personal use, that will have a multitude of users, and potentially a wide range of people other than me maintaining that use behind the scenes is what I'm loosely calling enterprise software. In such cases it is very likely that the person who installs the software may not be the person who maintains it, and that person will probably not be the same as the people who use the full functionality of the software, and even these people may be intermediaries with the real end users further down the chain of use. Examples of such software will spring quickly to mind for academic and library staff, e.g. your learning management system (LMS), your integrated library system (ILS), your content management system (CMS), and even your student record system. All of these would qualify as enterprise level software deployments under my characterisation. And it is these cases where I am claiming that documentation is part of the functional aspect of the software deployment.

By contrast consumer software - software that a single user can typically download and install directly - does not need to treat documentation as part of its functional aspect. I don't usually need to think about the documentation in order to choose to use this software and almost certainly it won't be the quality of documentation that keeps me using it in future. (This, by the way, is not a comment about the importance of documentation for a FOSS development community working on consumer software.) Of course there are some consumer software products that are so complex that I may need substantial end-user documentation. But let's move on.

Documentation is famously what developers least like to work on. Not all of them, obviously, but generally speaking. This could be because it is a special form of tedium to explain the blatantly obvious to the complete beginner. Imagine someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics called upon to teach addition to children. It could also be because software code itself is written in a language that can be read (and with FOSS also easily accessed), and thus any well-written code (with sufficient comments included as pointers ) should be its own documentation.

There are other reasons why documentation might not be at the top of the list for a project. In no particular order:

the project is at a very early phase in which the code itself is changing rapidly (and it is easy to convince ourselves that documentation ought only to apply to code that is stable);
the software is exceedingly technical and so the installation instructions alone are likely to be sufficient for anyone capable of using it;
the software is exceedingly easy to install and most users find its use fairly intuitive;
the development team has tight deadlines and cannot afford to take time away for documentation writing;
this is FOSS and I (the developer) am scratching my own itch (for the software) - if you have an itch for documentation you should write it yourself;
a documentation effort was started but ran out of steam and now the software has moved on;
it turns out writing cogent explanatory text for a range of audiences is a different skill than writing clean code (despite the requirement that code needs to be readable at least by other programmers).

It's not a complete list by any means, but it probably covers a fair number of cases.

However, if we begin with the assumption that, at least for enterprise software deployments, documentation is a functional aspect of the deployment, then the above rationalisations lose persuasive force. Enterprise solutions always involve more people than just the developer. Communicating everything from the installation procedure to basic configuration to full use is going to have to be part of what makes the software an enterprise solution in the first place. So, far from being a mere addendum to the software, documentation needs to be seen as crucial to a completed solution.

There are consequences to thinking this way. How often have you seen an official release (not merely a release candidate) of enterprise level software that did not have complete documentation accompanying it? How often have you seen software products whose documentation is significantly out of date or incomplete? How often is getting that next feature into the software more important than documenting how it changes things?

If documentation were really a functional aspect of enterprise software, then its drafting, careful editing, and appropriate quality assurance processes for it would be part of the release cycle of the software. That in many cases it isn't only shows that we have more work to do.

As I noted at the start, I have been prompted to rethink the basis of the importance of documentation for a FOSS project. I'm still thinking through the implications. But I do know one thing for certain. There is almost no greater service you could render a FOSS project you care about than to help them with their documentation. Get involved, do it early, and help to make comprehensive documentation part of the release cycle for your favourite enterprise level FOSS solution.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2008, Toronto - report

I was struck by a number of thoughts during the recent FSOSS 2008 event at Seneca College in Toronto. First, one cannot attend an event like this without coming away feeling as though FOSS is totally mainstream these days. The four parallel sets of presentations running over the two days of FSOSS 2008 showed FOSS in many lights. As well as a number of talks about integrated development environments such as Eclipse or OpenKomodo, there were talks about the development of specific FOSS communities such as the Thunderbird community or the Fedora community. There were talks that connected FOSS to the realm of copyright advocacy in Canada and to innovative licensing frameworks such as Creative Commons. And there was an entire streak of discussion on Teaching Open Source, for indeed FOSS in a key component in a number of forward-thinking computer science and technology programs both at Seneca and elsewhere.

I think the fact that FOSS is not some kind of esoteric plaything is important, especially for typically conservative organisations like educational institutions. Choosing FOSS solutions these days is as common as apple pie, so to speak.

The second thought that struck me was how perfectly sensible FOSS in libraries fits in to this mix. That observation was supported by the response to a presentation on the FOSS ILS Evergreen by Dan Scott and John Fink. It fit right in to the programme. Of course librarians should be developing FOSS solutions for themselves. Why wouldn't they? Indeed it would be more surprising to learn that FOSS didn't have a significant role to play in libraries these days.

I will mention two further presentations that caught my eye. The first was an update report on a Mellon Foundation funded project based at the University of Toronto called Fluid. Technical Lead, Colin Clark, and Project Manager, Jess Mitchell, detailed a fascinating array of agile development techniques that support the widely distributed team working on Fluid. The energy and enthusiasm was palpable. And the outputs of Fluid - commonly used pieces of functionality that are thoroughly accessible designed with user-centred techniques which will be integrated into existing applications (e.g. Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, etc.) - will have a lasting impact on the interfaces we deal with in FOSS solutions deployed in educational environments.

The other talk that I will draw attention to is that from Andrew Ross of OSBootCamp. Andrew works for Ingres, an Ottawa-based open source database company. In an effort to help build knowledge and understanding of open source and some of the tools used to develop it, he started a series of relatively low-key mini-conferences. The response locally was startling and so the meme has spread. Through corporate sponsorship, OSBootCamp is able to provide organisational and (limited) financial support for others who wish to take up this dissemination model. There have now been OSBootCamp events in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and beyond. And this is only the first year of effort. Next year they hope to grow the model even more. A positive story and something I think the eIFL-FOSS country coordinators may want to look to for inspiration and ideas.

All in all, FSOSS 2008 was an excellent event.

Greenstone training workshop, Nairobi, Kenya, 22-26 September 2008 - report

(Guest blog post from Amos Kujenga, National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Library, Zimbabwe)

The week before last, Misheck Nyaluso and I were at the University of Nairobi where we conducted a 5-day Greenstone Workshop (from Monday 22 - Friday 26 September). The event was sponsored by UNESCO (Nairobi Cluster Office), organised by the Kenya Information Preservation Society (KIPS), and held at the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library. Several people spoke at the opening ceremony and of interest was the presence of Mrs Jacinta Were, the eIFL country coordinator for Kenya. She was also part of a Steering Committee which in 2005 was involved in the initial feasibility study for the establishment of a Greenstone Support Organisation for Africa.

A total of about 24 participants (mostly librarians) were trained and given attendence certificates on the closing day. We borrowed a bit from the Lesotho workshop style by concentrating on the general DL issues on the first day. This was of great benefit to some of the participants who (believe it or not) thought Greenstone was some scanning software! It was also interesting to note how digital libraries have been so closely associated with scanning that people sometimes fail to realize that there are many many collections that they can build from "born digital" material.

KIPS has to date produced a Greenstone CD-ROM of a list of abstracts of Theses and Dissertations about Kenya. Infact, most of the participants were drawn from organisations that contributed content towards this collection. There was also a demo of a Greenstone CD-ROM of articles on Gender Issues from Kenyan newspapers by the Kenya Indexing Project.

With KIPS playing a leading role, there's much potential for big time Greenstone projects in Kenya, moreso since they've already set the pace by virtue of their existing collection. They expressed great zeal to establish a network of "Greenstoners" in Kenya and judging from the performance of some of the participants, the future looks bright. If KIPS can work closely with other organisations, e.g., the local eIFL consortium (Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium - KLISC) much can be achieved to build an effective user and support network. We also continually encouraged the participants to play an active role on the sagreenstone discussion list, in addition to using the other technical support resources.

We also had Zoe Cormack from the Rift Valley Institute giving a brief talk on their work on the Sudan Open Archive project. This was an eye opener for many who got to get ideas of how to handle complex scanning/digitisation issues.

The UNESCO representative, Mr Hezekiel Dlamini (to whom we're quite grateful for inviting us to assist in running this workshop) also indicated willingness to have an advanced workshop - which, however, would only be for those institutions that would have evidence of some work with Greenstone.

On the whole, we had an interesting week in Nairobi, not to mention the confusion on the roads! To quote one taxi driver, some tourist once exclaimed, "Anyone who can drive in Nairobi for a month without a scratch deserves an international driving license!"

ACCESS2008: Library Technology Conference, 2-4 October 2008 - report

Maybe it's just me but sometimes I need to recharge my batteries. Here is my solution: spend a couple of days with energized library technologists, FOSS developers, and systems librarians. Well, I did say that maybe it's just me. Fortunately my batteries got a full charge this week at Access2008, Canada's première library technology conference, which was being hosted just down the road from me by McMaster University. The librarians attending Access2008 totally get the need to take a holistic approach to ICT in libraries. And they mostly get FOSS as well. In fact I think I met more dedicated proponents of FOSS in libraries over the course of this conference than I had ever known existed.

One of the highlights for me was the opportunity to see keynote speaker Karen Schneider, whose blog has long been a must for librarians concerned with technology. Karen is now Community Librarian for Equinox Software which is the principal support company for Evergreen, a FOSS ILS. I thoroughly enjoyed her talk entitled Open++ - dispatches from the OSS frontlines. Karen was sharing some of the pluses (or "++" - which signals praise and potential karma points in the IRC channels that library technology geeks frequent) and a few minuses of her task of explaining open source on the ground in libraries. It is no small task to set out to demystify the FOSS community and ethos, but it is all part of the effort to spread the word about Evergreen.

Perhaps it is just the nature of the Access conferences, or maybe it is a reflection of the state of libraries in North America at the moment, but I found FOSS everywhere I turned. Dale Askey of Kansas State University gave a great talk about the anxieties some of us have about letting people see our code, and the real need to get it out there. Eric Lease Morgan spoke about his MyLibrary project at the University of Notre Dame. Walter Lewis and Slavkio Manojlovich spoke about the partnership between AlouetteCanada and OurOntario.ca All of these are FOSS efforts, naturally.

Other FOSS-relevant talks were given by a whole panel of librarians demonstrating their various uses of the Drupal content management system, and I was astounded by the simplicity and elegance of LibX (which started as a FireFox plugin but is also avaialbe for IE). Karen Coombs from the University of Houston gave a great presentation on the extremely modular approach she takes there for library services, disavowing monolithic solutions and instead knitting her library web space together with contributions from both proprietary and FOSS components. And of course one of the talks I was most keen on hearing was that of John Fink of McMaster University and Dan Scott of Laurentian University on progress in the Conifer project, which bring together a number of Canadian university libraries in one very large Evergreen instantiation. Dan, of course, is no stranger to eIFL.net having led the Evergreen training component of the eIFL-FOSS ILS project working in Armenia earlier this year. The news on Conifer is that progress is going well and the current expected date for all of these libraries to "go live" with Evergreen is the spring of 2009.

Evergreen did tend to be ever present at this conference. But other FOSS ILSs were also heard from. At least one group of public libraries located in the Ontario hinterland have decided to band together and share expertise on Koha.

Of course this conference wasn't entirely about or for FOSS in libraries. Access2008 is a conference for library technologists and there were lots of other solutions being canvassed. But perhaps it is only human for the most exciting buzz to come from IT solutions that librarians are creating for themselves that they can share with their peers. Thus one appeal of open source, perhaps.

I haven't followed news of mass digitization projects closely so perhaps I was the only one astounded by the talk by Jonathan Bengston and Sian Meikle of the University of Toronto on the mass digitization project going on there. I confess I had no idea of the scale of this. It is immense. Literally thousands of books are being digitized on a daily basis. This is impressive even as merely a feat of organization. But the results were also impressive. Sadly this mammoth effort has a shakey fundation now that Microsoft has decided to end its funding. But it certainly gave us food for thought about what is possible with sufficient resources.

The conference was rounded off after two and a half days with an inspiring talk from Bob Young, famed local entrepreneur and co-founder of RedHat.com and Lulu.com. Bob is always good value as a speaker but I found him especially insightful today as he contrasted his life in technology firms with one of his current roles as owner of a professional sports franchise, the Hamilton Tiger Cats.

I should finish this conference report with a mention of something that happened the day before the conference began: Hackfest. Hackfest is a day-long event in which librarians and programmers gather, divvy up a problem set, and set to work. You might say, it is the very spirit of what Access2008 is all about. You might also be wondering just how much real development work can actually get done in a day. The answer: lots! I was consistently impressed as the various groups that had worked together reported back during the conference. Here, for example, is Dan Scott's blog post on his Hackfest activity in which he was sorting out how to use Zotero with Evergreen. Cool!

My thanks to the organisers of Access2008. My batteries are re-charged. Full steam ahead!

Software Freedom Day - 20 September 2008

Is your library "connected"? I mean connected to FOSS community outside your doors? Do you know who is working with FOSS in your local community? Do you have regular contact with them, perhaps through your friendly local Linux User Group (LUG)? And if not, how do you get your library involved with your local FOSS community?

I want to combine two really useful suggestions that came my way recently.

The first, as indicated by the title of this post, involves the world-wide FOSS awareness raising event: Software Freedom Day. This year Software Freedom Day (SFD) is on Saturday, 20 September. It is a worldwide celebration of free and open source software, a fun time to come together with like-minded individuals and share some of your enthusiasm for FOSS. Local teams form to decide how best to mark the occasion. Activities range from parties, to workshops, to distribution of free cds or dvds with FOSS software, and more. It can be a lot of fun and there is no good reason why librarians shouldn't have fun too!

There is a really useful guide to what you can do for Software Freedom Day. That can help if you want to form your own local team and do your own thing. Or you could choose to link up with some other team in your city or region and work with them on their activity planning. Here is a map showing where teams are registered around the world.

Which brings me to the other useful suggestion that came my way.

One of the resources that libraries have is space - a place where people can come together to meet and share ideas. If you are looking for an opportunity to connect with local FOSS groups, then one of the easiest routes is to offer to host an event for them. Use your library space to your advantage and make that your contribution. Let the people you invite in provide the content for a talk or a workshop or just a meet and greet. It doesn't need to be tremendously formal. It just needs to happen.

Oh, and one more thing. Tell us about it!

If you are planning an event with local FOSS enthusiasts, whether for Software Freedom Day or for something else entirely, do let us know. We would love to share the story of your event/meeting/workshop/dinner with photos and even brief interviews for podcast.

What will you do to celebrate Software Freedom Day?

Community Liaison - the intersection of FOSS users, developers, and businesses

The recent appointment of K.G. Schneider - prolific blogger on librianship, writing and everything else, since 2003 - as Community Librarian for Equinox marks a significant milestone. It is significant both for the FOSS development community behind the Evergreen integrated library system (ILS), and for the company that employs the majority of the Evergreen developers and provides installation and support contracts to libraries deploying Evergreen.

Karen describes her role at Equinox as chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. Sounds like fun. But in practice community liaison is hard work. Often you are interacting with volunteers, urging them to commit even more time to your project. Sometimes you are the only face or voice of a project that users come to know. Those not familiar with FOSS development and FOSS business communities will see you as merely a marketing person. Others will make assumptions about your intimate knowledge of the source code (and potentially be disappointed). You are always called upon to be enthusiastic, insightful, and, I think, slightly distanced from any corporate body that employs you. Your allegiances will constantly be scrutinized - are you there merely as a spokesperson for the support business, or do you represent the users' interests? So it helps if you are part of a project you are honestly proud of and enthusiastic about. From Karen's report, that seems to be the case here.

Fostering community could be the most important aspect of a successful FOSS development project. Some development environments, such as those found in the projects under The Apache Software Foundation umbrella, value community contributions as much as contributions of code. And since most Apache projects do not have a named person with the title community manager, everyone - both users and developers - is called upon to serve this function collectively.

I don't know when the community manager position was initiated. It seems like we have had people in those roles ever since the business community got involved in FOSS development projects. I suppose that makes sense since, as a paid position, the role of Community Manager needs some form of revenue stream behind it to make it viable. But that connection to the profit motive has also always required a delicate balancing act. When business does not play nice with FOSS development communities, relations quickly sour. Fortunately most FOSS-related businesses have a keen sense of what is and what is not appropriate.

There is a difference between a community liaison manager from a company that controls the copyright on all of the code in a project, and one in which the copyrights are diversified with only a shared licence holding the code together. A further difference arises between FOSS projects that are small, tightly knit communities - which, I suppose the Evergreen community is in many respects - and large communities full of volunteer contributors and, certainly, users - which might better characterize the Mozilla projects or the Ubuntu Linux distribution. A thoroughly unscientific bit of research using only a search engine (searching jointly for "community manager" and "open source") finds numerous entries, both job advertisements and company descriptions of their community liaison personnel. I might hazard that such a role is no longer an oddity - it is an essential part of how business interacts with FOSS development.

And in case you think I'm playing favourites by focussing on Evergreen's new Community Librarian, think again. Because of course LibLime - the largest installation and support company for the Koha FOSS ILS, and employer of a great many of Koha's most prolific developers - has its own community liaison person and open source evangelist in Nicole C. Engard. A sign, perhaps, that FOSS business and FOSS in libraries are developing nicely together :-)

Comments: If you can login to the eIFL.net website, then you can add comments to this blog post directly. If not, just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net and be sure to let me know whether you wish your comment to published and attributed (I'm also happy to receive comments that you don't wish to have published).

The Code4Lib Journal - essential reading

As readers of this blog will know, I am not a professional librarian, and I am also not, by training, a programmer. Fortunately for me, around the time I started working closely with librarians and (even more scary?) software developers for libraries The Code4Lib Journal was launched. Its mission is to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. While it can be dangerous getting caught in an intersection, this journal perfectly captures where I'm at and what I need. It has, even with only two issues released, become essential reading.

The Coordinating Editor of The Code4Lib Journal is the estimable Eric Lease Morgan. It has a solid Editorial Committee, and welcomes input via its Google Groups discussion list. The journal welcomes new submissions and currently uses an editorial process rather than blind peer review. This a journal by librarians, for librarians. The editorial committee is looking for content that is practical, demonstrates how to exploit technology to create digital library collections and services, or offers insight and forethought regarding the use of computers in any type of library setting.

The current issue admirably displays the kind of content the editorial committee is seeking. I was especially drawn to Edward M Corrado and Kathryn A. Frederick's article on Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides. In this survey of resources, Corrado and Frederick canvas a wide range of FOSS applications, only a few of which I have seen in use previously. They also go on to non-library specific tools such as blogs, wikis, and course management systems that are often used to reach the same ends. All-in-all, a very useful summary.

Another article that caught my eye was Dan Scott and Kevin Beswick's report on their attempts to extend the usefulness of ICT hardware through a FOSS LiveCD, Quick Lookup Laptops in the Library: Leveragin Linux with a SLAX LiveCD. Scott and Beswick undertook a project to improve their users' experience using near-obsolete hardware (at least from a North American perspective) in the J.N. Desmarais Library of Laurentian University in Canada. The hardware wasn't up to the task of running its operating system (Windows XP) and installed software - or at least it was so sluggish as to be virtually unusable. The solution was to convert these machines to running a kiosk Linux LiveCD. The article describes the problem, the proposed solution, and then provides some of the code used to enact that solution. As I was reading it, I immediately wondered whether just such a practical solution might not benefit some libraries across out network. And of course related solutions are already being used in eIFL.net libraries to maximise the life of aging IT hardware.

Just an example of two of the articles I found useful in this new journal. But I've got it on my list now as essentially for me. You might want to consider it for your list of good library ICT reads.

NewGenLib - a new FOSS ILS ready for use

NewGenLib, which stands for New Generation Library, is an integrated library system (ILS) that some of you, especially those in India, Syria, Sudan, or Cambodia, will already know. It is the product of a 4-year collaboration between the Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management (KIIKM) and Verus Solutions Pvt. Limited (VSPL), both based in Hyderabad, India. Toward the end of 2007 a business decision was taken to release NewGenLib under the GNU General Public License (GPL). And thus NewGenLib was reborn as a free and open source software (FOSS) ILS.

The code - should you immediately want to begin investigating NewGenLib's functionality - is available from SourceForge, the repository of more than 170,000 FOSS projects: NewGenLib on SourceForge. Since NewGenLib is Java-based, it deploys straightforwardly on Linux or Windows platforms. Just follow the installation notes for the platform on which you will be deploying.

NewGenLib was already a complete ILS prior to going open source. It boasts modules for

Acquisitions
Cataloguing
Serials Management
Circulation
Administration
OPAC, and
Reports.

The current release is version 2.1, but version 3.0 is under development with a targeted release date of April 2008.

The biggest challenge, of course, is whether NewGenLib will be able to transition itself to a FOSS development model. Releasing code under a FOSS licence is easy compared to building and sustaining a FOSS community of users and developers. Will NewGenLib make the leap?

One positive sign is the set of discussion forums that NewGenLib has set up on its SourceForge site. I don't find forums as easy to negotiate as an email discussion list, but clearly many people like them and these seem to be busy. (The downside to that is that multiple forums mean more work for people within the project that need to respond to queries in various fora.) By contrast, the mailing lists for NewGenLib on SourceForge show very little use.

Deciding to release the code under the GPL also means a significant shift in business model. Or does it? The licence fee-based model under which NewGenLib previously operated was essentially tied to service support contracts. Under a FOSS licence, support contracts continue to work in exactly the same way. The developers, however, have moved to clarify matters by setting up a separate IT services company - Verus IT Services Pvt. Ltd. - in order to take on the servicing of the open source deployments, as well as existing commercial licensees. The most significant change for the business model is that, as FOSS code, nothing prevents other companies form also offering support contracts for NewGenLib. But if hundreds more libraries take up NewGenLib on account of its FOSS credentials, then there will be plenty of room for multiple support companies in different countries. Even better if those competing support companies are able to contribute code to the further development of NewGenLib.

Changing a licence does not, in itself, change the software. So, at the moment NewGenLib is about the same product as it has always been. But joining the world of FOSS does make a difference. It makes a difference to the future, to the future of NewGenLib and possibly the future of the FOSS ILS. It's great to see another FOSS ILS joining the ranks of Koha and Evergreen. And it bodes well for libraries in developing and transition countries that so much choice is now available.

I will be following NewGenLib's management of its fledgeling FOSS community closely, and with good will. I really hope it makes a great show of it.

IRC: information on tap

Internet relay chat (IRC) is a familiar communication tool in FOSS development and user communities. It can be vibrant, fast-paced, friendly, exceedingly geeky, and ideal for getting a quick response to a hard question you just haven't been able to sort. If you have not tried it previously then now is as good a time as any.

You could start by exploring the IRC channels, or chat rooms, that support Koha or Evergreen development, or for the more daring amongst you, try the code4lib IRC channel.

IRC is real time, or synchronous, communication. So the people chatting on an IRC channel are doing it right now before your eyes. This puts their collective expertise and experience immediately at your finger tips. But of course it also limits you to just those who are in the room at any one time. The more people in the room, the more likely it is that there will be someone there who has dealt with precisely your question before. Be sure that your interventions are brief, to the point, and courteous. And in most cases you will get a helpful response.

Some people keep their IRC client open on various channels all day long (even all night). Just because you see the nick of someone you know listed as being in the channel, don't assume that they are necessarily monitoring the chat room at that moment. To constantly monitor all the IRC channels you might like to be in would take up every moment of the day. Even just staying up with the incredibly chatty code4lib channel can be daunting.

And that brings up logging. Most IRC clients (I use Pidgin - which has versions available for Windows and Linux) support some form of local logging of the channels you are in. So you might spot my nick - I usually show up as randym - in a channel, but I'm off doing something else at the moment, maybe reading or answering email, or writing a blog entry. Later I will review my local log of the activity in the channel to see if something especially interesting showed up. And if someone pings me, Pidgin will catch my attention.

Using IRC this way changes it from a synchronous communications format to a static information page. These pages won't be treasured for their brilliant prose, but they could reveal the most pressing problems confronting users of the software. Which could make them very useful indeed. Both of the projects above make their IRC logs publicly available and searchable: Koha IRC logs; Evergreen IRC logs (a recent addition).

The other great advantage of logs for IRC channels is that they make the discussions available to those who may be many time zones distant, or who may have intermittent Internet connections.

IRC isn't for everyone. Me, I love a good email list, especially one that is publicly archived and I am prone to enthusing about such lists. Some of the FOSS projects I've been involved with simply couldn't work in a coordinated way without email lists, either because there were too few people involved to make an IRC channel sensible (is there anything as sad as being the only person in an IRC chat room?), or because time zones simply made it impractical. On the other hand, you might agree with a friend of mine who once complained that, Email is so 20th century!

Maybe. In any case, there is plenty of room for multiple channels of communication serving different ends in FOSS development and user communities. And IRC has advantages that make it well worth learning how to use well.

OLA Super Conference: the profession of librarianship

This past Thursday and Friday I attended the Ontario Library Association (OLA) Super Conference in Toronto, Canada. It is a huge annual event in the professional librarianship calendar in Ontario (and beyond) with more than 1000 delegates and up to 29 parallel sessions running at any one time. It's all here and it is all focussed on the professional development of librarians.

Since I'm still very much an outsider to the world of librarians, I find myself noticing things that are probably taken for granted by my peers. Take, for example, the very idea of professionalism. Imagine 29 separate sessions, 3 to 4 of them per day, plus plenary sessions. And each of them on some specific aspect of the life and work of the library. The level of detail is remarkable. And all of it dedicated to helping each delegate improve their work, their library, and the service they provide to their patrons. I was just way impressed.

A good example came from the very first session I attended. Some of you reading this blog will remember Nasser Saleh. Nasser used to be the eIFL.net country coordinator for Palestine. For a number of years he contributed greatly to the growth and development of eIFL.net. Nasser now lives in Kingston, Ontario, and is the Integrated Learning Librarian at the Engineering and Science Library of Queen's University. (He's also doing a Ph.D. part-time, but if you know him, you won't be surprised at just how busy he keeps himself.) Together with his colleague, Sharon Murphy, Nasser was presenting a session entitled Colleagues: get out of the library. In it they detailed the efforts being made at Queen's to integrate librarians into the classroom, to reach out to students and researchers where they learn and in doing so facilitate their access to knowledge. Impressive. And the audience of assembled librarians thought so as well. There was plenty of discussion of how things were working at other universities, and ideas put forward of what to do next.

After such a bracing start, I was worried that the talk I was participating in that day, Open Source and Libraries in the Developing World, might not be equally well received. I should learn to relax more. Fortunately for me I was sharing the platform with Nasser himself, and with eIFL-FOSS' good friend, Bess Sadler of the University of Virginia. We had a packed room which was immensely satisfying. (Remember, there were 28 other sessions going on at the same time.) Bess gave the intro and overview about free and open source software; Nasser spoke about what eIFL.net does, and then I stepped up to tell people about our new eIFL-FOSS program. People were interested and enthused. For these librarians, what goes on in libraries in developing and transition countries is not some esoteric interest: the librarians in those countries are their colleagues, their peers, and often their friends. That's another one of those things I've learned. Librarianship is a profession, and professionals share a bond with each other no matter where you find them.

Amongst the folks kind enough to attend our session was Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps and co-founder of Global Voices On-line. We were all a little in awe since Ethan was the big keynote speaker at the conference that day. But I later learned he is a keen supporter of eIFL.net and his blog about our session couldn't have been nicer.

Ethan's talk itself was entertaining and enlightening. What I took away was his observation that, "homophily makes us stupid." And if you don't know what homophily is, you'll recognize it as soon as you do; it's that undirected but incessant grouping instinct we have to flock together with birds of like kind. Ethan's point was that we are seeing lots of instances of homophily on social networking sites. And while it's nice to hang with your "friends" a lot, you'll probably learn more, face more interesting challenges, and grow a bit more by encountering strangers. In a way, that's why I took up with eIFL.net. I figured I'd learn more here and more quickly. I was right :-)

The sessions on Friday were barely any less well-attended than the Thursday sessions despite an horrendous snowstorm battering south-western Ontario. Yes, this is Canada.

I was tremendously psyched to attend a session by Dan Scott of Laurentian University entitled, Evergreen: state of the open-source ILS. Dan is the project coordinator for Project Conifer, which brings together Laurentian, Windsor, and McMaster University as they investigate, pilot, and potentially migrate to the Evergreen ILS. Dan is immensely talented as a programmer, and has a great presentation delivery. Of course when you completely know what you are talking about, it probably helps :-) I finally think I have a good handle now on precisely where Evergreen is on its development curve and, especially, on the level of enthusiasm amongst Ontario libraries, both academic and public, for this venture. One of best things about FOSS is that nobody can constrain you from simply picking it up and starting to use it. So you run into situations, as in this session, where librarians were piping up and surprising Dan with announcements that they too were in the process of migrating to Evergreen. It got so that at one point I wanted to stand up and say that I too was Spartacus. Fortunately I contained my enthusiasm.

Systems librarians are, I suppose, a different breed than, say, reference librarians. Certainly the discussion at Dan's talk was considerably more technical than any I had heard the day before. And that got me wishing I were having more fun with source code than I am at the moment. But that's another story ;-)

Two final items from the OLA conference. The first is Erik Hatcher's presentation on Blacklight: Univeristy of Virginia's catalogue on SOLR. Erik is frighteningly clever and willing to give a presentation while things index and compile behind the scenes, live. No doubt that's because he trusts his own code :-) Blacklight is a little project that has huge potential. It is a "next generation library catalog written in ruby, using solr as the underlying search engine." But in layman's speak, it is a cool, faceted access to your catalogue. Naturally enough it is a FOSS project and, also not surprising, our good friend Bess Sadler is closely involved in the ongoing development of Blacklight. I intend to check out their subversion repository in the next couple days and take a look at the kind of code that super-coders write.

Finally, a nod to Our Ontario. This is a collaborative project delivering integrated access to digital collections of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, galleries, and more. This year it deservedly won the OLITA award for technological innovation. You won't be surprised to learn that Our Ontario is built entirely on a FOSS stack using Cocoon, Lucene, and Solr. And if it is innovative technology for libraries in Ontario, wouldn't you expect to find Art Rhyno involved? So it won't come as a surprise to learn that Art is the Chair of the Steering Committee for Our Ontario. And thus I had the pleasure of meeting up with Art again.

OLA Super Conference was certainly a new experience for me, one that has confirmed my impression of librarians as a highly professional and committed group.

OLPC: open source, open access, open library - University of Windsor

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited along for a special evening celebrating, publicising, and enthusing about the One Laptop Per Child project organized by Mita Williams of The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. I had been asked to speak on the significance of free software and to inform those assembled about the eIFL-FOSS program. A perfect opportunity for me to enthuse about subjects dear to my heart. But also - since an OLPC laptop was given away to an audience member during the proceedings - a chance to think a bit about what it means to create new possibilities.

I spent a lengthy drive to Windsor thinking about just what the relative significance of free software is. I wondered to myself (okay, maybe I was actually talking aloud to myself in my car; it happens!) what were the important breakthroughs in the past 100 years. The discovery of penicillin was certainly important. Is the creation of free software through the means of appropriate free and open source licences more or less important than the discovery of penicillin? I just don't know. But the fact that I don't know means I think it is at that level or beyond.

No doubt I spent too long in my talk enthusing about the possibilities created through the application of a legal instrument (in this case, the GNU General Public License) as a means of preserving four freedoms concerning software: 0) the freedom to run the program for any purpose, 1) the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, 2) the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, 3) the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. It was these four freedoms that Richard Stallman sought to preserve when he drafted the first version of the GPL. And in so doing, he changed the world.

I don't know how often people do things that change the world. Change it fundamentally. Fundamentally because the very possibilities of that world are substantially altered.

Is the OLPC project going to have that kind of effect? Maybe. Maybe some day we will look back on it and say that it was as important to the world as the discovery of penicillin. Or free software.

And what is the connection between free software and the OLPC? Well, this exciting device runs entirely on free software. The operating system is based on Fedora Core 6 Linux. The activities (OLPC-speak for programs) it runs are themselves all free and open source software. And for most them you can press a button and actually see the source code for the program.

I kept wondering as I drove to Windsor through the cold Canadian winter whether those geeky free software developers who contributed a line or two, or made dozens of lines, of code to the Linux kernel ever guessed that some day someone would be creating a whole new range of educational and social possibilities, in part due to the free software they had helped to create. I suspect not.

That's the thing about creating new possibilities. You just can't tell where things will end up.

It was a lovely evening surrounded by librarians, students, and researchers all fired up by the advent of possibilities. For which I'd like to thank Mita Williams, my co-presenters, Art Rhyno, Systems Librarian at the Leddy Library, and Dr. Dragan Martinovic of the University of Windsor Faculty of Education. And of course also the two sponsors, The Leddy Libary and The Essex Free Press.

Zotero - a FOSS tool for publishing and managing bibliographies

Zotero (http://www.zotero.org) is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension for managing and citing references and creating bibliographies. Zotero is the FOSS alternative for EndNote®, the product of Thomson ResearchSoft, a business of the Thomson Corporation.

I tested Zotero on Armenian Libraries union catalogue, on the PLoS and Birmingham Open Access repositories, and on the Library of Congress catalogue. It created bibliographic records with the needed metadata without problems. Moreover - you can create your citations and bibliographies inside of the OpenOffice. For this you need to download a small plugin from the Zotero page http://www.zotero.org/documentation/openoffice_integration . (Zotero is also compatible with the MS Word, but I haven’t tested that.)

As a result of exploring Zotero, I am planning to organize a series of training sessions for the students and young scholars in Yerevan. I found that Zotero is easy to install and manage. Within the word processing systems Zotero suggests a wide variety of citation styles, which can be used when creating citations inside of your documents.

Tigran

ILS Migration - the long game

This past Friday, I had the good fortune to meet up with John Fink at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. John is Digital Technologies Librarian in the Mills Memorial Library at McMaster. Amongst his numerous responsibilities, 50% of John's time is devoted to managing McMaster's transition to a new open source integrated library system (ILS) – Evergreen. I wanted to discover where that project is at as well as a little bit about John's connection with free and open source software (FOSS).

A library's integrated library system (ILS) is the single most important piece of software in its infrastructure. The ILS touches nearly every part the library, from acquisitions to cataloguing, from patron management and lending to the OPAC and more. Libraries, as a rule, do not like to mess with their ILS. They tend to find one they like, deploy it, and then stick with it.

John came to McMaster in September after following up a job advert in the spring of 2007. What attracted him was the explicit mention of open source software in the job description. His first involvement with FOSS came while pursuing an undergraduate degree in English Literature in Ohio. In time he drifted in to IT support and then systems administration on unix-based machines, which in the late '90s and beyond were often being replaced with Linux boxes. One library science degree later and some intensive experience in a medical science library in California, and John was ready for the open-ended challenge that McMaster's libraries, now under the tender guidance of Jeff Trzeciak, University Librarian, present. (Some of you will remember that Jeff spoke at the eIFL.net General Assembly meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, this past November.)

So when exactly did McMaster decide to investigate Evergreen, and why? The decision was made before John arrived on the scene. The reasons are many: part of it had to do with the announcement in March 2007 by SIRI/DYNIX that it intended to phase out its Horizon ILS, the one that is currently in use at McMaster (or rather that was the way the announcement of introduction of Rome was taken). So that meant change was in the air. Part of it certainly had to do with the great strides that the Evergreen developers were making at the time. And no small part of it must have been the fact that at least a couple other Ontario universities were serious about Evergreen at the same time (more on that in a moment). No doubt there are other reasons in the mix. A large university library does not change its ILS whimsically nor precipitously. It takes a measured view. And it plays a long game since an ILS isn't something you chop and change every year.

It is worth noting that the libraries at McMaster are not overwhelmingly FOSS driven. When John arrived there wasn't anyone else using Linux on the desktop, and even today he thinks there are only three. The public-facing machines are all Windows boxes. And there are relatively few Macs to be seen. Where FOSS had a role to play was on the servers, which are typically Red Hat Fedora Core machines. John notes that there is also some FOSS in use in the document management system and in conferencing software, an example being Open Conference Systems from the Public Knowledge Project . The decision to move to Evergreen was thus not ideologically driven.

How has John been getting on with Evergreen?

Excellent. Five months into his post he has Evergreen up and running locally on a test machine dealing with a sizeable chunk of McMaster's catalogue. But there is ever more testing to be done. In fact John was about to wipe everything out and re-install on a clean Debian machine just to be certain he has the procedure down. It's no simple thing to evaluate a new ILS. Caution is the watchword. And care. And it helps to have a lot of support.

For support, it makes a big difference that both the University of Windsor and Laurentian Unversity are evaluating Evergreen at the same time as McMaster. Art Rhyno at Windsor and Dan Scott at Laurentian are both, according to John, much more into the code than he is. (John sees himself as a deployer of FOSS, not really as a developer.) They are making significant contributions to Evergreen's development, especially in the acquisitions and serials modules. Having them nearby and willing to lend an ear (via email or on Evergreen's IRC channel) takes a lot of anxiety out of such a big move. These universities effectively have created a support and deployment consortium. Eventually they will house their Evergreen deployment on a shared Linux cluster based at a fourth Ontario university, the University of Guelph.

If migration to a new ILS is a long game, just how long will it be before McMaster has made the switch? Apparently the target for migration is summer 2008, though some slippage has been allowed for. For a time thereafter Evergreen and Horizon will run in parallel. And then eventually, at some point approximately 2 years after the original decision to migrate was made, the migration will be complete.

Will anyone notice that McMaster is using a FOSS ILS once they've made the change? Probably not. John says that good software gets out of your way and lets you get on with what you need to do. But the decision to go with a FOSS ILS makes a world of difference to those behind the scenes, especially digital technologies librarians like John Fink.

Open Translation Tools, day 3

The final day of Open Translation Tools 2007 found us tired yet eager for more. We followed a similar pattern to day 2 with parallel sessions dominating, punctuated by another SpeakGeeking session. By this day, I had a much clearer idea of what I needed (at least in regard to the challenges ahead for the eIFL-FOSS ILS project). Nevertheless it was still a hard choice to decide which sessions to attend.

The first session I joined was on business models in the open content sphere. I thought I might have something to contribute to this discussion since I have a reasonable grasp of business models in the open source world. In fact I'm not sure I was able to contribute all that much. Most of the revenue streams in the open content projects represented were from grants from foundations or trust or government. That, of course, is a worthy model. But it has challenges when it comes to sustainability. The other model we discussed was primarily support/training. I think everyone present sensed that there is a potential publishing business model around open content tantalizingly close. But I didn't feel we were able to flesh it out. We were, however, fortunate to have a couple of entrepreneurs in our group. They kept us tied to the real world. This was useful because in the end the success of a business model is tied to your ability to meet your payroll month in month out.

In the second session I joined up with the software development folks to talk about localization of software. I confess I felt more at home in this group. Every one (which the possible exception of me) was an experienced FOSS developer, comfortable with the tool chain used for localization, and ready to discuss the challenges they were facing. Fortunately I had learned enough on Day 2 of OTT07 to at least follow the conversation. The key challenge for most localizers of software is upstream software developers who have not planned for internationalization from the start. Clearly that ought to be a prerequisite for any FOSS development project (I now understand). But even if the project has designed for future localization efforts, that still won't avoid the inevitable challenge of language itself. What is the best Serbian word for “Inbox”? How do you make an interface that is built around the memes of office culture (e.g. files and folders) accessible to a potential audience where office experience is minimal? Does that matter? Should you incorporate a jargon term from an English interface if there is no simple substitute in the target language? Or does that undermine the natural evolution of your language? Hard questions to be sure.

The SpeedGeeking session on Day 3 was just as exciting as that on Day 2. Again, I will hold off describing all of the relevant projects here. But do expect to find posts on many of them in the coming weeks.

The final parallel session of the event saw us dividing into the original two groups: tool and open content. Contrary to what I had done on Day 1, this time I went with the tools folks. The focus for each group was on practical next steps. What emerged in the tools session was that a number of the developers had discovered possibilities for future development through collaboration with other projects present. The first tentative steps towards these were already taking place. Only the constraints of time, resources, and other commitments can hold back exciting new developments around the corner.

Open Translations Tools 2007 was an excellent event. Everyone participating came with knowledge and experience to share, and found others with knowledge and experiences from which they could benefit. The constant focus on participation (much spoken of elsewhere but rarely achieved) made the days exhausting but highly rewarding. To close out the day, Gunner asked us all to look around the room and really see each participant there. Definitely a group I was honoured to be a part of.

Open Translation Tools, day 2

Day 2 at Open Translation Tools started bright and early. And just as interactive as day one. Now that we all had a bit more knowledge under our belts, it made sense to go around the room again and ask each participant to identify something specific they definitely wanted to get to before the end of the next day. For me that was easy. I wanted to at least have set up an environment on my machine where I could potentially participate in localization of source code.

If you've never done that kind of thing previously you wouldn't even know where to begin. But now (or at least by the end of day 2) I understand that for most FOSS projects what you are really doing is taking a .pot file - effectively the list of all the strings of text in the program's interface - and translating each of those strings into the target language. The completed set of translated strings is saved as a .po file. So, one .pot file, many .po files, one for each localization. There are other systems, of course, but this describes the norm in FOSS projects.

Gentle reader, I'm delighted to say that by the end of day 2, I had indeed installed a .po editor (I used poEdit), downloaded a .pot file from a FOSS project and tried at least a few translations of some of the text strings in order to create a localized .po file. I learn in very small steps :-)

Once again this day we broke into parallel discussion groups. The choices were hard, since I have so much to learn, but for the first one I went with the group discussing challenges and opportunities in managing a volunteer translation community. There, I was inspired by Danilo Segan's account of managing the 300+ volunteers contributing to the Serbian localization of Gnome (one of the familiar desktop environments for those using a Linux distribution). In the same vein, Dimitris Glezos explained how the Greek localization of Fedora (the Linux distribution, not the institutional repository) works. At least on the surface, it was clear that the localization of software seems to be organized differently than the volunteer communities translating open content manuals or other text.

The second parallel session I participated in was focused on quality assurance, or quality assessment. Here the differences between localization efforts for software interfaces versus translation of free text again came to the surface. Professional translation of text always involves a careful layer of proofreading and editing. Our discussion concentrated on how to get at least some of that built into the workflow for community-led translation efforts. I doubt we fully cracked this problem, but at least everyone involved got a much sharper view of where the challenges reside.

The first SpeedGeeking session of the OTT07 took place immediately after lunch. Since very few will ever have experienced SpeedGeeking, I'll describe it briefly. Take 7 people with fabulously interesting projects or software tools. Give them each a table and whatever communications tools they desire. Divide the remaining participants between each of the tables (about 3 or 4 people per table). Then begin. The SpeedGeeker gets 4 minutes to describe his or her project. When time is called everyone (except the SpeedGeekers) moves to the next table. Repeat. In about 35 minutes you have been introduced to 7 exciting new projects. It is exhausting, especially for the presenters, but you will certainly have identified one or two people you absolutely must follow-up with later. Very efficient, and lots of fun.

I'm holding back here from describing each of the projects lest this post become impossibly long. Instead I'll do an individual post on each of the projects that impressed me later.

After a short break we went back to the parallel session format. The one I attended concentrated on workflow for translation in an open content project. What was clear was that most workflows were ad hoc, created through trial and error rather than on the tried and tested model of the professional translation industry. But of course the conditions are different.

The second day concluded with another communal meal and lively conversations that extended far into the night (and, for a few participant, in to wee hours of the morning).

Open Translation Tools, day 1 concluded

Day 1 finished off the way it had begun, with plenty of interaction amongst the participants. We started by dividing into two groups, those who had use-cases describing content in need of translation, and those who had translation tools to discuss and enumerate. I was in the group attempting to characterize clearly differentiated use-cases. The challenge with such work is to be as granular as possible since this is the only way that an accurate mapping will be made later between the use-cases and the tools available.

One of the things I've liked best about this event has been the focus on documenting what we are doing. Four separate documenters are participating in the event. One is continuously adding content to the event wiki. Another is specifically responsible for gathering and characterising the variety of use-cases. Another is doing the same thing with the range of tools available. And finally there is another documenter videoing the proceedings who will also conduct video interviews with each of the participants. It's all about openness and these various documentation methods and tools should guarantee that outcomes from this event will be available widely and not just for the participants.

The final session of the afternoon took three of the problem areas that we had brainstormed in the morning and made them the focus of a discussion. For this I joined the “Translation 101” group in order to get a crash course on the translation industry (which I was shocked to find is a 12 billion dollar behemoth). This session was facilitated by two professionals in the field of translation (though admittedly they got very little notice that they would be facilitating a session): Ed Zad of dotSUB and Dwayne Bailey of Translate.org.za This session was absolutely priceless for me. I am now considerably better versed in the correct terminology. For example, I now know the difference between internationalization and localization, and between translation and interpretation. I understand the traditional model (translate - edit - proofread) used in the industry and why that is changing. I learned about the all important component of any successful computer assisted translation tool or CATT, namely translation memory TM, not be confused with MT, machine translation. I also learned of the emerging XLIFF standard which encompasses po, the string set format typically found in software translation cases. To say it was a lightening class is an understatement. And this has made the likelihood that I will get something even more valuable out of day 2 an almost certainty.

Open Translation Tools 2007, day 1

I am in Zagreb, Croatia, today with a fabulous collection of folks passionate about open content and FOSS translation tools. Open Translation Tools is organised by Aspiration and the Multimedia Institute [MI2]. It brings together software developers working to develop translation tools with projects that have particular use-cases for translation. Together we are going to learn from each other and seek to bridge the gaps, if they exist, between use-cases and available tools.

The remarkable Allen "Gunner" Gunn, Executive Director of Aspiration, has been facilitating a highly interactive day which has included an analog opinion differentiator (not as high tech as it sounds!), small group brainstorming, concept grouping and, of course, lots of opportunity to meet new people and learn about their projects. Since I am a complete newbie to the world of translation tools, I am finding that nearly everyone I speak to has something to teach me. And of course they are equally interested to hear about what eIFL-FOSS is proposing to do with its ILS support documentation project. I'm especially looking forward to the Speedgeeking session tomorrow.

I will report further as time permits (I'm on short lunch break at the moment!) with links to some of the tools that stand out.

FOSS policy: personal and public

Should I have a personal FOSS policy - a set of principles by which my software decisions are made? I suppose in some sense I already do. I use Mozilla Firefox all day long, every day. I use OpenOffice wherever possible. I use GIMP for my photo editing. I use Pidgin for IRC, and a host of other FOSS packages. But do these choices I have made amount to anything more than a set of preferences, or, less charitably, prejudices? Is there any coherent policy that could be distilled from them?

Maybe it's just me, but this is a question I ask myself on a regular basis. And it is also a question I frequently ask universities and colleges.

I suppose in theory the way to go about things would be to come up with your policy first and then implement it in practice. But that isn't the way life generally works. Instead we tend to have a practice that gets modulated or modified as we take up the policy challenge. And that explains why it is so useful to come back and ask the policy question again and again.

In practice I find that I am a pragmatist, but a principled one. For example, I'm not averse to using a proprietary operating system (no prize for guessing which one). But I would also be just as happy using Ubuntu. Over many years I have structured my work environment so that I use the same set of programs regardless of which operating system I'm using. My pragmatism forces me to use whatever operating system is available to me. My principles help arrange it so that I'm (mostly) using a FOSS suite of programs regardless of operating system.

When institutions approach the FOSS question they also tend to strike a pragmatic balance. Some like to have an explicit FOSS policy that lays out how FOSS ought to be factored in to the IT decision-making process. Others will have no explicit FOSS policy at all, subsuming all such matters into a broader IT strategy. I know of one ICT Strategic Plan which is 111 pages long, 3 years in the making, yet contains no mention of open source software or free software in the entire document; in fact, the word software is not used at all. This, despite the fact that FOSS is used across the IT infrastructure at that institution.

Policy can also find a home at a much higher level, of course. It's the sort of thing governments are good at generating. It would be a worthwhile mini-project to gather data on just how many of the eIFL.net member countries have national policies concerning FOSS.

What I most want to know, however, is not merely whether a country, or an institution, or a person has a FOSS policy. What I want to know is how that policy (whether it is publicly accessible or not) is affecting real decision-making on the ground. Not, "Do you have a FOSS policy?", but rather, "What has been the practical impact of your FOSS policy?"

The space between policy and practice - that's where I'm headed. But first, I think I'd better get my personal FOSS policy written down :-)

What's the impact of your FOSS policy on your practice?

Getting started with a new FOSS community: user email lists

How do you get started with a new FOSS community? Perhaps someone recommended a software package to you. Or it came up in a news story. Or someone spoke about it at an event you attended. Or someone has told you (your boss?) that you need to get familiar with it. Or maybe you are just curious and want to learn something new (hey, it's possible!). What do you do?

No doubt your first step is going to be to go grab the software, install it, and give it a whirl. Sure, that's a good idea, but I'm focusing here on your first steps in getting to know the FOSS community that is using, developing, and supporting that software. How do you get to know a new community?

One starting point is the user email list. If there isn't a user email list, then I would go straight to the developer list. Some projects do not separate their user list from their developer list, or at least not until the volume on the unified list becomes unmanageable. But assuming there is a distinct user email list, the first thing I usually do is sign up to that list.

And then I listen.

And listen.

I might sit on a user list for some new FOSS community I am joining for months before I make my first intervention. A user list is not the service window in a repair shop. It's (usually) a community in the midst of a conversation. I want to listen to the way this new community talks to itself before intruding.

What are its typical concerns? How are queries handled? Is it friendly? Is it tolerant of new members who may ask naïve questions? Just a few of the questions I'm going to have foremost in my mind. In reality I want to know whether this is a community I want to be part of, to spend time in, to contribute to.

Is the user email list active? What is the frequency of questions being asked, and how long until someone offers an answer? Who usually answers questions on the list? Is it one of the key developers, and, perhaps more important, is it the same person all the time (which might be a sign that knowledge is overly concentrated in one individual)? Do people who have asked questions in the past ever start answering questions later? More questions here about whether there is a progression from user to supporter. And if that isn't the case, why isn't that happening?

When someone asks a question, are answers given in a form they are sure to understand? Are they regularly referred to user documentation, maybe a project wiki or manual that ships with the software, where the asker can both find the answer to this question and others they are likely to have? Great if this documentation is already in place. But why hasn't the user found their answer there already?

If the user email list isn't publicly archived, that is a bad, bad sign. And if it is, then I've got a fabulous resource available to me as well as to web indexing services like Google. By investigating the archive I can see how this community has acted and reacted over time. I may even get a sense as to where it may be headed in the future.

Why is all this important? Because in many cases the user support email list will be the first port of call if I run in to difficulty deploying software. That, even if my institution should choose to take out a support contract from some company. It might even be a factor (though perhaps not a deciding factor) in my institution's choice between competing FOSS alternatives.

For the past 3 months I have been lurking on the user email lists of both Koha and Evergreen.

Koha mailing lists
Join the main Koha user mailing list (Koha also has a number of specialized lists available including lists in French and German, see above)
Web archive for the main Koha user mailing list
Evergreen mailing lists
Join the Evergreen (Open-ILS) user mailing list
Web archive for the Evergreen user mailing list

What have I found? Well, that's a subject for another day. I am more interested in what you have found, if you too have been lurking on these lists.

I invite you to share some of your impressions of the Koha or Evergreen communities based on your participation on their respective user mailing lists. We still haven't sorted our spam control for comments, so please just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net and be sure to let me know whether you wish your comment to published and attributed (I'm also happy to receive comments that you don't wish to have published).

One final thought: FOSS communities evolve. Your participation on a user mailing list can impact, even transform, the nature of that user community. And that is a heartening prospect :-)

Free Software & Open Source Software Symposium - Toronto (day 2)

Day 2 of this conference started better than day 1 since I didn't get lost getting here. First up for me today was a talk entitled The Development Commons: A Virtuous Circle of Software Production for Virtuous Organisations. The presenters for this were Jason Cote and Julian Eglestaff, both of Freeform Solutions. They provide IT solutions for not-for-profit organisations. They use free software in their work, and they ensure that any software development they do as a result of their work is also contributed back to the commons. Essentially what not-for-profits pay for when they come to FreeForm Solutions is time - time for Freeform staff to find a viable solution to their problem set. One of the positive features of their business approach is that, knowing their client base, they aim for solutions that require zero maintenance for the client, and which adhere to strict budget constraints. Jason and Julian know that not-for-profits usually only have a very precise amount of money allocated for a specific IT solution, and that there is no tap they can turn on to make more money flow later. So the solution they provide effectively has to be able to run forever. Jason also pointed out that they have a business policy of not dealing with any client that wants to have an exclusive development relationship with them. If the client isn't happy to have the code that gets developed for the their problem contributed to the wider commons, they can find someone else.

The next talk I attended was David Eaves' presentation on Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency. This is a subject close to my heart so I was keen to hear David's take on it. David has a great presentation style that keeps the audience interested and gets them involved. He is also somewhat sceptical about claims to the collaborative nature of open source, but perhaps he was merely playing devil's advocate in order to provoke discussion. In any case, he offered some suggestions on how to facilitate collaboration that he imported from his experience in the realm of politics and international relations. I don't have any disagreement with his suggestions, but I find myself somewhat sceptical of his basis for some of his sweeping generalisations about open source development communities. I find that nearly every FOSS development project I engage with is unique. It takes me a fair bit of time to get a strong sense of how the community works, to pick up on the explicit and implicit rules of engagement. Even two different projects in the same development "house", so to speak, for example two projects from The Apache Software Foundation, will have slightly different ways they do things, different expectations of participants perhaps, and of course, different real people with different real personalities that are struggling to cohere. It takes time to learn the particularities of communities. Since David's initial insight into the importance of community is definitely on the mark, I'd love to talk to him after he has more experience with actual FOSS development communities and has taken the time needed to engage with one or more of them in a serious way.

I'll pass over Jesse Hirsh's talk on The Problem with Open Source: Know Your History quickly since I didn't feel there was sufficient content there to grapple with, but maybe this is just another example of me being the wrong audience for this talk.

Yesterday, lunch was a pleasant surprise meeting new people. Today I spent my lunch hour with those same people and about 50 others. David Eaves and Mark Surman ran a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Open Source, Open Communities? At tech conferences, BOF sessions are usually unscripted opportunities for people with a shared interest to get some quick interaction. With so many attending this BOF, I wasn't certain David and Mark would be able to do much at all. I was wrong. It was great! Having marked a line across the room with a "yes" at one end and a "no" at the other, they got everyone up on their feet and asked them to "place" themselves on the line in response to a series of provocative statements made by Mark. David then went up and down the line asking people why they either agree or disagree with the claim. In this manner we explored such questions as the role of democracy in open source projects and the importance of collaborative skills for a project leader. Stimulating and thought provoking.

After lunch I went to hear Rory McGreal talk about Copyright control and open access: From Queen Anne past Bill 60. Rory knew his stuff and spent the hour exploding 10 myths about copyright. I thought I knew this subject inside and out, but I learned a fair bit, especially about how we treat copyright in Canada (well, to be fair, I've been away for 13 years so I've sort of lost touch). One thing I've learned is that whenever two or more people gather in Canada to talk about copyright, the first person they mention is Michael Geist :-)

The final talk of the day was again a plenary session. This time the keynote speaker was Dirk Riehle, who leads the Open-Source Research Group at SAP in California. Dirk was speaking on Open Source Economics: Stakeholder Perspectives. This was an excellent presentation, filled with succinct clarifications of terms, clear statements backed up with actual data, and sensible conclusions: a model. Dirk's analysis traced the path from "traditional" Community Open Source (think of the Linux Kernel), to Commercial Open Source and its business models (think MySQL), to New Community Open Source which is similar to the traditional model but has significant integrators involved in the development (think IBM and Eclipse). Dirk's thesis, based on an economic analysis, favours the New Community Open Source Model. Fascinating stuff - I could learn a lot from Dirk.

And that rounds off what for me was a thoroughly enjoyable conference. It's always a treat to meet up with others you've only seen on some project's mailing list, or even just to see how enthused young people are about FOSS and FOSS development communities. It's a positive sign for the future.

[Just a reminder: if you would like to comment on any of these blog posts, please just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net. We'll get the real commenting facility sorted in due course.]

Free Software & Open Source Symposium - Toronto (day1)

I have the good fortune, for once, of living close enough to Toronto to participate in this year's Free Software & Open Source Symposium. Two days of talks on subjects ranging from Open Content: Shared Curricula in a Web 2.0 World, to Reading and Reviewing Code, to Open Source Education in South Africa, and Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency. All that as well as the opportunity to mix and mingle with some of the folks I've only admired virtually to date, such as Louis Suarez-Potts from OpenOffice.org, and Bob Young co-founder of RedHat. With so much accumulated wisdom on hand, I'll certainly be making a point of attending Jesse Hirsh's talk entitled The Problem of Open Source: Know Your History tomorrow.

Day 1

The first talk I was able to attend (misunderstood the driving instructions to the venue - don't ask!) was Code Reading and Reviewing presented by Benjamin Smedberg who is a Platform Developer in the Mozilla Corporation. The talks were running in three parallel stream but this one was a great way for me to start this conference. I'm not a software developer by training or by inclination, so reading code is a real challenge for me. Benjamin did a good job explaining both why reading code is important and how to set about it. You might think that the why there is too obvious for words. But what if I'm primarily wanting to deploy this software as opposed to develop it? If the software is a substantial part of my institution's infrastructure, then knowing how it works ought to be important to me. And understanding how it is written is a key part of knowing how it works. But how should I start reading code in a project I am new to? Benjamin had some good advice. He noted that you need to learn by doing. Start small. Read patches. Try to see how a particular patch works. If possible, follow the code of a single contributor to a project over time. Follow his or her contributions and you will begin to see how someone who understands the code better than you is thinking about the code. Of course it is always an advantage to know your tools. And, you won't be surprised at this last one - learn your coding languages! If you are reading to learn (and this after all is precisely what FOSS always provides, i.e. access to knowledge), then Benjamin suggests that you try to get clear on what it is you are trying to learn, then get the big picture, read the unit tests, try writing a test program, follow the rules, break the rules, ask questions. In short - get involved!

The next talk I attended was Mike Beltzner's Embracing the Chaos: designing for and with community. Mike also works with the Mozilla Corporation as Director of User Experience, so it was an all-Mozilla morning for me. One thing Mike was able to convey perfectly succinctly was why community is so important for Mozilla. Mozilla has about 40 paid staff. But it has a further 100 people contributing code daily on a volunteer basis; there are more than 1000 who are periodic contributors, submitting a bug report or a patch and following it through to its implementation (or rejection); there are at least 10,000 people around the world who test Firefox builds on a daily basis; there are more than 500,000 people who count as beta testers; and finally, there are more than 40 million users of Firefox worldwide, and Mike considers them part of his development community as well. That's a lot of community effort as against the total number of employees from Mozilla. Thus community is important to Mozilla, no question. So how do you go about working well with such a far flung community? Mike had three pieces of advice that he went on to elaborate: 1) listen to your community; 2) lead your community; and 3) let your community play and experiment. Great advice.

Lunch at most conferences is usually a desperate affair for me. Terminally shy, I find it hard to simply strike up conversations with strangers. I was in luck today. I happened to sit down beside Mark Surman who is an Open Philanthropy Fellow at The Shuttleworth Foundation. By a happy coincidence I had a long telephone conversation with Mark about the eIFL-FOSS program and eIFL-FOSS ILS project only a few weeks ago. So it was easy to say hello and meet face-to-face for the first time. Mark's philanthropy extended to introducing me to others over lunch, so I got a chance to meet James Humphreys from Seneca College and David Eaves, who is a prominent blogger, public speaker and consultant on negotiation, strategy, and public policy. I was already planning on attending David's talk tomorrow on Community Management as Open Source's Core Competency so it was nice to meet him in advance and discover he's also a nice guy.

In the afternoon I skipped Mark Surman's talk on Open Sourcing Education in South Africa in order to go to a talk from Ross Turk who is Community Manager at SourceForge.net. That was a mistake. Alas Ross didn't have anything to say about community at all, although I did learn a great deal about how the back-end of SourceForge is cobbled together. Fascinating, but not terribly useful for me (it wasn't that the talk was bad; I was just the wrong audience).

Next up for me was Matt Norwood who is Legal Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center talking about Licensing Strategies for Cross-Project Collaboration. I was wondering if this might be relevant to the kinds of cross-project collaboration we see these days in Sakai, Moodle, Kuali, etc. But it was really just a thin talk about paying attention to the legal niceties when combining code that is permissively licensed (such as BSD or MIT licensed code) with GPL code. Matt didn't have much to say about licensing strategies. So, once again, I was probably the wrong audience for this talk.

The final talk of the day was a plenary session with Bob Young, co-founder of RedHat and founder of Lulu which provides a platform for self-publishing. Bob is always good value, full of tales of the early days of RedHat and his difficulties in convincing people that giving software away was a plausible business model. He is passionate about freedom but not, as he says, an ideologue. Mostly he is a self-described entrepreneur and so that is what his talk focused on. However, his passions rose to their heights (well, he didn't actually throw anything) when someone asked him his opinion of software patents. I'll give you the short version of his extensive reply: he doesn't like them :-)

It was a good day. I have plenty of praise for the organiser of this event. They've left me very keen for what will come tomorrow.

By the way, photos from the day and video of most of the talks is available from the conference website. So I'll be able to go back this evening and see the talks I should have gone to.

Welcome to the eIFL-FOSS blog

First blog posts are notoriously content-free. But not this one. Instead of just saying, "Hello, world!", I will try to outline how I will be using this blog in future, the kinds of posts you can expect to find, how this blog relates to projects within the eIFL-FOSS program, and how to respond to blog entries. But first, let me tell you who I am.

My name is Randy Metcalfe. I am the Program Manager for eIFL-FOSS.

eIFL-FOSS is a program of eIFL.net which advocates free and open source software (FOSS) use in libraries in developing and transition countries. It aims to raise awareness and understanding of FOSS, facilitate eIFL.net member engagement with FOSS development communities, and undertake projects of special significance to eIFL.net members.

The project of special significance to eIFL.net members that we are undertaking, is a project supporting evaluation of and migration to FOSS integrated library systems (ILS), in particular Koha and Evergreen.

If you decide to follow this blog, perhaps by adding its feed to your favourite blog reader (you can find the urls for the feeds in the top right corner of the main blog page), then you will hear a lot about Koha and Evergreen. You will also hear about various aspects of free and open source software, and of FOSS development, that strike me as particularly salient. You may even have to suffer a few personal posts about conferences I attend, or libraries I, or one of my colleagues, visit. I will be pointing to shining examples of excellence in FOSS deployment or development. I will also be ruminating on the lessons to be learned from less shining examples. But mostly the posts will keep coming back to core issues in the eIFL-FOSS ILS project.

Together with my colleague Tigran Zargaryan, who is the Project Co-ordinator for eIFL-FOSS, and an entire cohort of eIFL-FOSS country co-ordinators, we will be exploring the software available from these FOSS development communities. We will be testing it, piloting it in libraries in different countries, investigating the support documentation currently available, writing some of our own documentation to help each other evaluate our current setups, and eventually migrating to either of these FOSS ILSs. Or not, as the case may be. The goal here is not to migrate to a FOSS solution merely because it is a FOSS solution, but rather because in some particular case it is the best solution. Just how "best" is cashed out there, of course, is likely to be a subject of numerous blog posts.

I will be learning right along with everyone else. In fact, you will quickly discover that I know less about how libraries work than anyone else involved in this program. Some of the folks involved also know considerably more about the technical end of software than I do. Others know considerably more than I do about writing code. But that's not surprising. Any vibrant community - and I hope and trust the eIFL-FOSS community will become one - is made up of people with different histories and skill sets, and probably also differing personalities and preferences. What we share is a common interest in learning how to engage with and participate in FOSS development communities to serve a particular end, our shared itch if you will, to help our libraries serve their users even better.

I hope the above sounds like the kind of blog you might want to stay in touch with. If it does, be sure to add the feed for it to your blog reader. I expect to be posting here at least once per week. And I promise they won't all be as long as this one :-)

Comments for this blog are currently constrained only to registered users of the eIFL.net site. We will probably open that up as soon as we can ensure that we have a way to avoid blog spam. But you can still send me your comments by email, and I will be sure to make mention of them on the blog. You can write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net. I look forward to hearing from you.

Oh, and one last thing...Hello, world!