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I have been very busy writing and posting blog entries but alas, the content is all living elsewhere. Much of what I write is for clients and these reports sometimes find their way to this site. But not always. For now, take a peek at a new website I'm working on with King County Library System and the other rascals involved in moving libraries to open source library systems.

Thomas Krichel of Palmer School of Library and Information Science has developed, and is sharing, course material for an intensive course he developed in which students, without any previous system admininstration experience, installed debian, and then installed Koha.

http://openlib.org/home/krichel/courses/lis508p10w/

All 17 of his students were successful...wanna give it a go?

Closerware has teamed with TechSoup Stock to make its web-based VolunteerMatters operations management and outreach software available to nonprofit organizations and public libraries. Organizations that make use of volunteers can use VolunteerMatters to schedule shifts, maintain contact information, publish an online directory, send email and postal mail communications, and generate various kinds of reports.

If you're a new developer that wants to obtain more in-depth knowledge of Evergreen, this is a great place to start:

Califa, in partnership with InfoPeople, is pleased to be presenting The Edgy Librarian, an online web conference held on January 20, 2010, featuring many of the new technologies being used in libraries, and show-and-tell sessions from libraries using those new services! Registration information is below, and the sessions are as follows (all times are in Pacific Time Zone):

The OLE Final Report is out and it begins with a "research scenario" that OLE is striving to support.  In other words, the library software they are planning to develop (in the next phase which is code named the Kuali OLE Project) could make the following scenario a reality...

An economist is conducting research on the housing market financial collapse.

In Mark Leggott's lengthy response to Stephen Abram's article, he challenges many of Abram's claims and does so from his own  relevant experience:  Leggott is from the University of Prince Edward Island which migrated off SirsiDynix Unicorn to Evergreen.

The following four issues (fears) often come up for people when they first start looking into an OSLS (open source library system):

Roy Tennant has provided some must-read words of wisdom for Library Administrators.  Here's my personal favorite:

#4: Maximize the effectiveness of your most costly technology investment -- your people. As technology itself falls in price per unit, your staff is likely to get more expensive. So pay attention to what is required to make the most effective use of them. This means getting them the training and resources they need to do their job well.

"BibLibre wants to push libraries who call us to do development work, for Koha or any other piece of software, to write in the RFP itself or the contract that all the code produced will both: have an open source license; and be accessible on a public repository."

via Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS | BibLibre