I truly believe that the meekest amongst us has a special duty and a special circumstance that fosters innovation. Ours is not the culture of red tape entrenched tradition, but rather the atmosphere of the pioneer. No one will notice a failed experiment in the middle of nowhere, but they’ll certainly notice a cataloguer someplace in Edema making a dent in backwards standards.

Some thoughts on the state of free and open source software in libraries.

Over the past decade, the library automation market has faced continuing consolidation. Many vendors in this space have pushed towards monolithic and expensive Library Services Platforms. Other vendors have taken “walled garden” approaches which force vendor lock-in due to lack of interoperability. For these reasons and others, many libraries have turned to open-source Integrated Library Systems (ILSes) such as Koha and Evergreen. These systems offer more flexibility and interoperability options, but tend to be developed with a focus on public libraries and legacy print resource functionality. They lack tools important to academic libraries such as knowledge bases, link resolvers, and electronic resource management systems (ERMs). Several open-source ERM options exist, including CORAL and FOLIO. This article analyzes the current state of these and other options for libraries considering supplementing their open-source ILS either alone, hosted or in a consortial environment.

Librarians and staff at St. John’s University Libraries created BKFNDr, a beacon-enabled mobile wayfinding app designed to help students locate print materials on the shelves at two campus libraries. Concept development, technical development, evaluation and UX implications, and financial considerations are presented.

While New Year’s day came and went with very little fanfare at my house (well, if you don’t count our Star Wars marathon), I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the time to mark the passing of the new year, with a look ahead to the future.  And I think it is fitting, then, […]

Data capture and use is not new to libraries. We know data isn’t everything, but it is ubiquitous in our work, enabling myriads of new ideas and projects. Articles in this issue reflect the expansion of data creation, capture, use, and analysis in library systems and services.

The SELIDA framework is an integration layer of standardized services that takes an Internet-of-Things approach for item traceability in the library setting. The aim of the framework is to provide tracing of RFID tagged physical items among or within various libraries. Using SELIDA we are able to integrate typical library services—such as checking in or out items at different libraries with different Integrated Library Systems—without requiring substantial changes, code-wise, in their structural parts. To do so, we employ the Object Naming Service mechanism that allows us to retrieve and process information from the Electronic Product Code of an item and its associated services through the use of distributed mapping servers. We present two use case scenarios involving the Koha open source ILS and we briefly discuss the potential of this framework in supporting bibliographic Linked Data.

Libraries share a number of core values with the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, suggesting there should be a natural tendency toward library participation in OSS projects. However Dale Askey’s 2008 Code4Lib column entitled “We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code,” claims that while libraries are strong proponents of OSS, they are unlikely to actually contribute to OSS projects. He identifies, but does not empirically substantiate, six barriers that he believes contribute to this apparent inconsistency. In this study we empirically investigate not only Askey’s central claim but also the six barriers he proposes. In contrast to Askey’s assertion, we find that initiation of and contribution to OSS projects are, in fact, common practices in libraries. However, we also find that these practices are far from ubiquitous; as Askey suggests, many libraries do have opportunities to initiate OSS projects, but choose not to do so. Further, we find support for only four of Askey’s six OSS barriers. Thus, our results confirm many, but not all, of Askey’s assertions.

Using the Crawford County Federated Library System’s development of an open source web kiosk management system, as an example, this article will illustrate how an open source library project is defined, specified, written, tested and rolled out. The article will also discuss how the project was released as an Open Source project and future development of the project. The web kiosk project is called Libki and was written to authenticate users and allow access to the Internet kiosks based on time limits. Libki is a completely Open Source project and is now used by multiple libraries across the US. The client side of Libki is cross platform and supports multiple operating systems including Microsoft Windows and Linux. The administrative side of the program allows access to user logs, controls time and access and allows the librarian to log a patron off the system in real time. Libki was completely developed and written by staff members of the Crawford County Federated Library System.

Throughout the library community examples can be found of development projects evolving into mission critical components within an organization’s workflow. How these projects make that move is unique and varied, but little discussion has been had about how these projects impact their developers and the project community. What responsibilities does a developer have to ensure the long-term viability of their project? Does simply freeing the code meet those long-term responsibilities, or is there an implied commitment to provide long-term “care and feeding” to project communities built up over time? Code4Lib represents a group of developers consistently looking to build the next big thing, I’d like to step back and look at some of my own experiences related to the long-term impacts that come with developing successful projects and communities, and try to provide library developers food for thought as they consider their own ongoing responsibilities to their projects and user communities.

This paper discusses a novel approach to adding user comments to existing platforms for bibliographic information, such as library catalogs. The application is built using simple and free services that support advanced functionality at a low price without requiring high-level technical skills. The strength of the approach described here is that it increases the number of comments available for display in any local catalog by consolidating comments from multiple sites and by clustering comments at the FRBR Work level. To do this, a central store of comments from multiple sites is created. In addition, the application uses ISBNs and OCLC’s Work IDs to consolidate comments from different publications (FRBR manifestations) for the same work.

Members of a Swiss, Austrian and German network of health care libraries planned to build a collaborative article reference database. Since different libraries were cataloging articles on their own, and many national health care journals can not be found in other repositories (free or commercial) the goal was to merge existing collections and to enable participants to catalog articles on their own. As of November, 2010, the database http://bibnet.org contains 45,000 article references from 17 libraries. In this paper we will discuss how the software concept evolved and the problems we encountered during this process.

The Wayne State Library System launched its library mapping application in February 2010, designed to help locate materials in the five WSU libraries. The system works within the catalog to show the location of materials, as well as provides a web form for use at the reference desk. Developed using PHP and MySQL, it requires only minimal effort to update using a unique call number overlay mechanism. In addition to mapping shelved materials, the system provides information for any of the over three hundred collections held by the WSU Libraries. Patrons can do more than just locate a book on a shelf: they can learn where to locate reserve items, how to access closed collections, or get driving maps to extension center libraries. The article includes a discussion of the technology reviewed and chosen during development, an overview of the system architecture, and lessons learned during development.

In 2000 a small public library system in New Zealand developed and released Koha, the world’s first open source library management system. This is the story of how that came to pass and why, and of the lessons learnt in their first foray into developing in open source.

Welcome to the 5th issue of the Code4Lib Journal. We’ve come a long way in just over a year! We hope you take a few minutes to celebrate those accomplishments with us as you explore issue 5 and read about the innovations, ideas, and experiences shared there. Let’s learn from each other.

‡biblios is an open source cataloging editor designed to allow libraries to perform copy and original cataloging in a web based environment. ‡biblios allows users to search for, edit, and save bibliographic records in the MARC21/MARCXML formats. It also allows users to send records directly to integrated library systems such as the Koha ILS. Where most MARC editors are part of an integrated library system (and therefore require logging in), ‡biblios allows users to catalog with an open source standalone system available anywhere via a web browser. Unlike other cataloging editors, it offers an attractive user interface for searching, saving and editing cataloging records. This article describes the system architecture and design of ‡biblios.

Librarians are among the strongest proponents of open source software. Paradoxically, libraries are also among the least likely to actively contribute their code to open source projects. This article identifies and discusses six main reasons this dichotomy exists and offers ways to get around them.

Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) are effective tools for managing source code and other artifacts produced by software projects with multiple contributors. This article describes DVCSs and compares them with traditional centralized version control systems, then describes extending the DVCS model to improve the exchange of library metadata.

Some simple modifications to VuFind, an open source library resource portal, improve the retrieval of both lists of works and information about authors from Wikipedia. These modifications begin to address ways that current “next-generation” catalogs fail to fully harness all of the bibliographic tools available for indexing and presenting author information. Simple methods such as those described in this article, which make use of full headings for authors, can offer marked improvements to these systems.

This article contains three reports relating to Code4LibCon 2008 — the third annual Code4Lib conference in Portland, Oregon (February 25-28, 2008). The first describes the birth of the conference and introduces the 2008 OSU / Code4Lib scholarship recipients. The latter two parts, written by the scholarship recipients, outline the things they saw and learned at the conference.