LoomWare

New Islandora Release Available

The development team at UPEI has been hard at work on a new release of the Islandora system, which integrates Drupal and Fedora into an extensible repository system. The latest release works with Drupal 6 and Fedora 3 and also has much improved documentation. The latest release includes:

• Customizable Collection View - Attach an XSLT stylesheet to a collection object and you can display a collection as anything from a simple HTML table-based grid to a dynamic JavaScript picture gallery.
• API for accessing and manipulating Fedora objects - Ingest new items, add datastreams, add relationships, do batch ingests all with an object-oriented PHP API designed to make accessing Fedora objects easy. No need to remember SOAP call syntax. Most API operations can be done with 2 or 3 lines of code.
• Collection Policies - Create collections and control what types of data users can add to the collection. Works with Fedora 3's content models for fine control over what datastreams new objects have. Users can easily fill out media-rich objects with consistently named and formatted datastreams.
• Plugin functionality - Dropping in a PHP class with custom ingest functions lets you automate actions to trigger on object ingest or adding a datastream. We've used this feature to automatically generate thumbnails, call out to document conversion software to generate PDFs from MS Word documents, perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned images or anything else you can access using Drupal, PHP and web services.
• XACML security policies - Islandora integrates with Drupal's users and roles so you can define which users and groups can view, ingest and manage repository items, with this security information being propagated via XACML into the repository objects themselves.
• Image manipulation API - Fedora uses Drupal's Image API to automatically scale large images before downloading them from the server. URL parameters inside IMG tags like "img src="fedora/iamgeapi/imgs:1/Image.jpg?op=scale&width=100" make accessing this functionality easy for site designers.

New developments include: additional content models distributed as Drupal modules (including samples from library and research environments); integration of the Djatoka JPEG2000 server; integrated Drupal TEI editor with side-by-side XML/image view; tighter integration with Drupal nodes.

WOW - OpenOffice 3 Sees Major Uptake

Over 10 Million Downloads in 1st Month

I think the numbers speak for themselves, whether it be providing a robust office suite for anyone who needs it, or making the future of document conversion better with a truly open office standard. OpenOffice 3 is a great product and has come a long way. I am particularly excited about the plugins for OO, including a postscript editor, Google Docs/Zoho integration and the ability to edit MediaWiki documents. We are also using a "headless" version of OO for back-end document conversion with our institutional repository and it is working like a charm so far...except for those pesky WordPerfect files...arghhh!

Vendor to Open Source ILS in 1 Month #1 - Thu May 29

Sirsi Unicorn to Evergreen Migration on Steroids

This is going to be an interesting series of posts for me for a few reasons, including the fact that some of them will be written and not posted for a couple of days/weeks (I started this on on the 22nd of May), rather than my normal write and post immediately style. This series is about the University of PEI Library's decision to move from the proprietary Sirsi Unicorn system to the open source Evergreen ILS in a very aggressive 1 month timeline...without a net :-)

While this is my 1st post on the topic, it is not the 1st day of the process, we actually started that in earnest about 3 weeks ago by loading Evergreen on a test server and starting the process of migrating our bib records from Sirsi to Evergreen.

I started writing the series a week ago because that is the day we had a Library staff meeting and decided to go live with Evergreen by Thursday June 5, after 1 month of preparation - hence the steroidal reference. All I can say after the staff meeting is WOW - what an incredible team here at Robertson Library. There were a number of critical issues identified, the key one being the quality and integrity of the data (bib, patron and transaction data) based on the assumption that we would not have access to the Sirsi database after the end of our maintenance agreement (hence the "without a net" reference above). What was so incredible for me was the determination and immediate sense of purpose that the staff had after the meeting last week. I saw a few staff hunkered down installing the Evergreen staff client and looking at the issues we had indentified as soon as they got back to their areas. I also sensed a high degree of positive anticipation that we would actually pull this one off :-) I had an image of one of those coroporate boot camps where people get together in the bush for 1 week and climb ropes and all that jazz - the only difference here is that our course is the Library and the ILS, but the team spirit is there in spades. GO TEAM GO!!

I will do my best to post on our progress and issues we encounter and will also encourage some of the staff here to post and/or comment at the same time. If you want to track where we are you can check out our Wiki Migration Page. More on the people in subsequent posts, but I should say up front that in addition to a great team here at UPEU we have the uber-awesome Dan Scott and Equinox team helping us out - couldn't even think about it without them...

NSDL Releases New Tools in the NCore Suite

Moving Digital Library Systems Up a Notch

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) NCore team has released an open source generic version of the NSDL Search, and the NDR Interactions MediaWiki extensions and WordPressMU plugins that power the NSDL Expert Voices blogosphere and NSDL Wiki. From the news release:

There are three packages to the NCore project on SourceForge. These are: 1) contentCache - the Nutch-based web crawler that stores page content for indexing and "best passages." 2) searchService (beta) - the applications that build and maintain the search index, along with the REST service used to access the index. 3) searchTools - common classes used by the other packages, and some utility applications for harvesting and parsing OAI.

Fedora 2.2.2 Release

Maintenance Release for Fedora 2 Sites

Fedora Commons has released a key maintenance update for Fedora 2.2.1 and is a recommended update for sites running 2.

Scraped from HatCheck

VuFind Rocks the House

Roy Tennant Finds Much to Like

With a recent new code release (0.6.1) VuFind is getting some much-deserved attention. VuFind is an OPAC replacement based on the Solr engine and provides some great functionality, including faceted browsing. It can also integrate many other emerging Library databases into a single search, including repositories and digital library collections. The modular approach should encourage additional modules. Hmmm...maybe a Fedora module down the road?

Scraped from Roy Tennant Library Journal Blog

If Life Gets Any Easier...

I'm Going to Retire.

I just tried out Jing from TechSmith (thanks to Dave Cormier) for the first time and I'm in love. These guys know how to create software. Jing is a dead easy way to create screencasts, or as Dave likes to call them, Disposable Learning Objects. Just download the software (Windows or Mac) and when run it loads a little Sun-ish looking icon in the corner of the screen (can be changed to run in the menu bar). Clicking the Capture "ray" allows you to capture an image, or more likely, a video (with audio) of a section of your screen. I can't imagine a more effective way of building information literacy widgets for your students. They could even be done on the fly after a virtual reference session and loaded up to ScreenCast to serve to the student you are helping now, or in the future. Once you get used to ripping out a few screencasts quickly you will wonder how you ever got along without them. The added bonus is the immediate sharing with colleagues via the ScreenCast site. You can also save the video as a SWF file, so keeping your own archive locally would be a good idea.

Comprehensive Wiki Guide to OS and Commercial Software

ITerating: Wiki-Based Software Guide

ITerating's new Wiki-Based Software Guide seems like a pretty solid resource. Good basic information is provided for each package. I've used it a couple of times now to find main sites and download information for a few packages. The idea of doing it as a Wiki is an interesting one...

Scraped from

Vuze by Azureus

P2P Video Downloading Client

I've always liked the Azureus Torrent client, so found the announcement of their new client interesting. This is a huge improvement over previous versions, which were a tad minimalist in their presentation. I suspect we will be seeing a lot more of this kind of development in an area that is starting to develop some commercial integration. I still prefer the Democracy site/client for models of this kind of application.

Zimbra open source mail client geeks it up

Web 2.0 Comes to E-Mail

I've always liked the Zimbra open source mail client - an excellent example of what an open and accessible system can become. It looks like more recent versions are even better, adding Zimlets, mashups that facilitate the integration of Web 2.0 features into the client. I can see SOOOOO MANY opportunities to use this kind of technology in education. Why aren't all universities (or institutions for that fact) using Zimbra instead or tired old fat clients and closed servers? Give the hosted demo a try - I'm drooling...