Open Source ILS Wins Mellon Award

Congrats to the folks of the Georgie PINES library system who recently won the $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

“The Mellon Awards honor not-for-profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open-source software tools with particular application to higher education and cultural heritage not-for-profit activities.”

The award was present by Tim Berners-Lee. He invented something he calls the “World Wide Web”, which we here at SLISIT think might catch on one day.

Free e-TextBooks for Developing Nations

Two professors in the U.S. are developing a collection of free online textbooks for use in colleges in developing nations. The content contribution model is similar to Wikipedia’s, but with a much more restricted set of final editors.

Librarian Bloggers

Library Journal did a survey of 839 blogging librarians to get a better understand of who’s blogging. The demographic breakdown may not be what you’d expect.

LISZEN

http://libraryzen.com/blog/

The beautiful thing about library geeks is that are often also tech
geeks.   And what’s geekier than a metasearch engine that focuses on
library blogs?  So much so that my geekdar went off the map when I
first visited this site.  And at first I just stared at the thing
wondering “why would I want to search library blogs?  I mean, I have
my own private collection of blogs that I follow, but I why would I
want to search for information from a source as unauthoritative as a
blog?”

However, I took the plunge and entered a search for “library 2.0″.
The tool worked its magic and yielded dozens of results on the topic,
including a series of responses to individual posts.   I was
immediately sucked in by the dialogue going back and forth in the
blogosphere.  This tool puts the discussion happening in the library
geek trenches (err..stacks?) at the reader’s fingertips with a minimal
amount of effort.

I suppose the only thing geekier than making this tool would be
appreciating this tool and using it to read about tech savy
librarian’s commentary on issues in the field.

-lw

Fac-Back-OPAC

Found via LibrarianInBlack-

Computers in Libraries recently featured Fac-Back-OPAC, an open source next-gen OPAC that features faceted searching and serves as a backup OPAC (hence the Fac and Back in the name). If you’re following next-gen OPACs, this is worth checking out.