TechEssence.info

I saw a note come through recently about a server that the University of Cincinnati Libraries had set up to be a "sandbox". What this means is that it is a place where new software (particularly open source software) can be installed for staff to investigate.

The sole admonition is to "Play nice together" and it currently has such applications as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, phpWiki, Tiki, and Moodle installed, among others.

I think this ia a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that the University of Cincinnati Libraries takes their responsibility to help its staff learn new technologies seriously. I wish that more of our institutions did so.

Jessica Hupp at VirtualHosting.com has put together an amazing list of web

Library Journal picked up on the Talis podcast about the Library Software Manifesto

Yes, the server was hacked recently, and as soon as I discovered it to be the case I backed up the data, wiped it, and reinstalled all the software.

The folks at Talis pulled together a group of knowledgeable folks to discuss the Library Software Manifesto published here at TechEssence.info. It has now been published on the Talking with Talis web site as a podcast.

Last week I gave a talk at the 2007 CODI Conference (Customers of Dynix, Inc.). I had decided to take as my topic a "library software manifesto" in which I would outline the rights and responsibilities of libraries and library software vendors. I posted about this on the Code4Lib mailing list and used some of the resulting comments in the resulting Library Software Manifesto published on this site.

"On September 5, 2006, over 250 libraries in the Georgia consortium, PINES, began using a next-generation integrated library system (ILS) they wrote from scratch. Within two months they racked up two million checkouts and half-a-million renewals for a collection of eight million items and 1.5 million borrowers." — "Dawn of a New Era," Library Journal, February 15, 2007.

In a soon-to-appear Library Journal column, I discuss strategies for an uncertain future. One of those strategies is the topic of this blog posting, since I wanted to both throw this out there for discussion as well as to discuss it more thoroughly than I can in an 800-word column.

Since I'm in the middle of moving from one software platform to another (leaving JSPs and Struts for Ruby on Rails if you must know), software choices have been on my mind. But then I picked up my latest Business 2.0 that came the other day and there it was. An article on Coghead, which aims to make code disappear and even the most code-phobic person able to create applications.

A colleague forwarded an announcement to me in which an open web-based reference management service announced it now supports OpenURLs as if that were the end of it. Unfortunately, it's only the beginning, and a rough one at that.