A new state-of-the-art resource sharing software has been in the works at Equinox (with sponsorship from ohioNET) for some time now. And while it isn't ready for download, it did cross a new threshold recently. As of August 2, 2010, FulfILLment was established as its own open source project (as opposed to a piece of Evergreen).
I'm heading off to Colorado today to talk with a library consortium about some of the exciting opportunities for expanding their services by taking advantage of open source technologies. What I'll be talking about is the openings created when a library migrates to an open source library system product like Koha or Evergreen.
Here's my starter list of the things library consortia can be (okay, I mean should be) doing:
Equinox has been talking about it for quite some time but there appears to be actual movement on a true open source ILL module for linking not just open source library systems but all ILS products (pending some standards compliance issues I imagein).
The name of the product is FulfILLment and the website says "it will provide library users seamless access to materials owned by libraries using FullfILLment—no matter which integrated library system his or her library uses."
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?
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):
There's been a lot of chatter in libraryland and now even in the open source community outside of libraryland about a SirsiDynix article written by Stephen Abram. The article had been released over the last few months to a few select SirsiDynix customers but was leaked around Halloween.