LoomWare

Freebase Available for Public Access

The Freebase site has opened up to public access (read only) and I suggest you check it out. I have mentioned Freebase on Loomware before, especially in the context of its Semantic Web/Wikipedia aspects. From the e-mail:

Freebase.com is now in "public alpha". Anybody in the world can search and browse the site. All applications based on the Freebase API have public read access.

Also, thanks to great feedback from an active alpha community, the Freebase site has improved quite a bit, and there is a growing group of enthusiastic contributors and developers. There is a lot of new data -- over 30,000 films, 500,000 notable people, more sports, businesses, science and so on.

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.

Digital Books and Google Earth

I wish I had more time to play :-( I just loaded Google Earth with the Google Book Search feature turned on (instructions). Once you do that you get little book icons on the Earth, each one corresponding to a reference to that place in a book available in Google Books. While I can well imagine a complex blob of books for New York and other places, it could be a fascinating way to find books (albeit old ones) that make reference to places you are interested in. I would suggest a Google Earth station at your local public library with this turned on may well find a new legion of book readers.

SCO Ghost Finally Exorcised

Legal Ruling Removes Open-Source Cloud

While this one hasn't been front and centre for some time now, the final ruling on the SCO suit against IBM regarding Unix has been settled. It is good news all around for the open source community, especially those who have made Linux a keystone in their operations. The SCO suit was one of the main culprits re spreading FUD in the Linux community, especially for organizations worried that they would have to pay licensing fees down the road if SCO was successful. Since that concern is no longer hanging over our heads, the goal of implementing Linux throughout the organization looks a little brighter. The Robertson Library at UPEI has starting to look at deploying Linux on the desktop and/or LTSP for a lot of our public access computers. Aside from squeezing a couple of extra years out of systems that don't cut it when it comes to Windows, it will also ease the support requirement significantly, whether on our side our our Computing Services crew. A LTSP terminal running Firefox with appropriate extensions and OpenOffice would be a pretty functional system for most purposes. Now if only RefWorks and other vendors has better support for OpenOffice we would really be happy.

eBooks Whitepaper

Costs and Benefits of eBooks to Academic and Research Libraries

If you are one of those institutions that is having a hard time selling the advantages of eBooks, then you may find some useful material in a recent whitepaper from Springer. AT UPEI we have invested significantly in eBooks and are finding that for the traditional academic tome, patrons are quite happy to use online version. Now if only all publishers would get in line with more liberal licensing (like unlimited access) so the real advantages of eBooks can be realized, that would be real progress.

Now I'm Really Pumped...

The other option for the title of this post was WOOHOO!!, but I thought this one was a little more elegant :-) The Fedora Commons project announced new funding yesterday that will build on the already good open source repository software, Fedora. This is great news for what has been a relatively small community, as this new entity promises to bring a new cadre of talented open source developers and new ideas. And that's what it's all about. From the press release:

Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations.

Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide.

I like what I'm hearing. Late last year UPEI embarked on an ambitious set of projects that use Fedora as one of the core components, highlighting the value of a centralized repository that underlies the administrative, research and learning enterprises on campus. Also key to this vision is the collaborative nature of work in the academic context, so the newly announced focus with Fedora Commons sounds like a great fit. If you are new to the possibilities of systems built on Fedora, try the Fedora Commons Video.

Open Library

Brewster Kahle At It Again

I have on occasion risked the ire of some of my colleagues by suggesting that the traditional OCLC model of selling bib records/access to an uber database of bib records is, well, stupid. OCLC, the self-described Library Co-op continues to hold on to a component of their business model that is not only mired in the old world, but actively holds us back in terms of what we can for each other and by extension, those we serve. Thanks to the fertile mind of Brewster Kahle (and colleagues) we have another option looming: OpenLibrary. Briefly, Open Library is an open database of book citations and the information about them. Anyone can edit the citation data love the options when you are viewing a book citation: Buy, Borrow, Download. The various options for a commonly digitized public domain title show the power of such an open system. As Tim suggests, it is "an open source alternative to OCLC". Now, if only they had partnered with the good folks building FreeBase I think we would have a killer product - and an open one to boot.

One might think that it is too late for OCLC to be part of the project, but I suspect that Open LIbrary would be happy to integrate WorldCat into their database. How bout it OCLC?

Scraped from Academic Commons

Mara Hancock on OS in Higher Education

Open Source Software and the User Experience in Higher Education

An interesting post from Mara Hancock at UCBerkeley (via PennStates Terra Incognita on the nature of OS projects and UI design in the higher ed context. What grabbed me was a couple of questions in her lead para:

Do we have the right skills in our development shops? Can we bridge the divide created by distributed development teams to make for meaningful and seamless applications that will meet the work flows of all our users?

As someone who steers toward the open source horizon as a way to build staff capacity, I ask myself these all the time. Make sure you check on the Fluid Project, which could provide some interesting set of UI components for common OS systems, including LMSs like Moodle and Sakai.

Scraped from Terra Incognita

Fedora and Drupal @ UPEI

Fedora and Drupal @ UPEI

Mark Jordan mentioned our efforts at UPEI to create a bridge between Drupal and Fedora, so I thought I would add a little more information. Although at the early stages, the general idea is to create a piece of middle-ware (currently being designed in Java and called PIDlet :-) that can act as a generic bridge between a Fedora back-end repository and a Drupal interface (or any other CMS/interface). We also hope to use Drupal's groups functionality to automatically associate a person/community with the appropriate identity in Fedora so we can "present" a form for ingest that matches what the user probably wants to do in that context. This is particularly important for our VRE project, which will provide a collaborative environment for our research groups as well as a data stewardship environment. A good example is a digital library system for the CMTC project here at UPEI. We will also have some simple Drupal nodes for displaying lists/objects from the repository. This same framework will be used to integrate Drupal into our Moodle system, which is replacing WebCT as our campus learning environment. Our hope is that the same Pidlet/PHP modules for Drupal will translate nicely into Moodle. I will have more on our Moodle efforts soon, but we are also doing some exciting stuff on the tight integration of library resources into every course on campus.

At the same time we will be working on custom interfaces for unique digital library cololections/projects in Fedora, where we can take advantage of a range of programming tools and frameworks (e.g. SOLR/Lucene) to create custom digital collections. The flexibility of Fedora is great, but also has a learning curve, so for a small shop like UPEI I think it will be extremely powerful - once we build that basic capacity. Exciting and daunting...

Scraped from mark's blog

Living Archives - New UPEI Project

Living Archives - An SL, Drupalish, historical research/Archives type project

My colleagues, Dave Cormier made this post about our new CCOP-funded project at UPEI. While an exciting project (which sprung from Dave's brain and morphed into the current version with the help of a number of people, including yours truly) our timeline is REALLY tight. For those out there who have done CCOP-funded projects this is not news, but you would think that someone like me, who has been part of a few, would have learned a lesson. Not. Gotta work with the funding opportunities. I also know that we will pull this one through the hat - we hired Bonnie Stewart as our project manager and she is doing an awesome job. Some additional lead team members include Sandy McCauley (the PI and a faculty member in Education at UPEI), Jill MacMicken Wilson (PEI Provincial Archivist), plus a host of others. I won't say much more on this one for a few weeks, as we are in full "how the heck we going to do this after all" mode, but it will be cool: a Drupal interface linking in and out to a java PIDlet that interfaces with Fedora to generate a collaborative text munged by 12 year olds after they visit a 1900ish PEI in a virtual world populated with assets from the same Fedora bucket. Easy, right? Pass the PB...

Scraped from