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Snrg2011 6.15.2.sta canney_suranofsky
- 1. “Free Beer” for Libraries? - Getting Results with Open Source Solutions SNRG 2011 @ FM Michelle Suranofsky Mark Canney Lehigh University
- 2. Philosophy of “Free” or Open Source Software “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” —Richard Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Movement
- 3. Philosophy of “Free” or Open Source Software The Open Source Licensing Model (GNU.org) defines four essential freedoms: • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- 4. Values of Open Source - Freedom - Transparency - Extensibility - Collaboration - Innovation Strength in numbers!
- 5. Successes of Open Source Operating Systems: Linux, Symbian, GNU Project, NetBSD. Servers: Apache, Tomcat, MediaWiki, Drupal, WordPress, Eclipse, Moodle, Joomla Programming Languages: Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby Client software: Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Songbird, Audacity, 7-Zip Digital Content: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Project Gutenberg
- 6. Viability of Open Source for Libraries What are ‘hidden’ costs and considerations? Is there really “Free Beer”? -Infrastructure -Development -Support
- 7. The Lehigh experience with Open Source: A pragmatic approach Lehigh Libraries has taken a pragmatic path of considering, on a case-by-case basis, feature-laden OSS for various needs: Discovery: VuFind Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit Web Presence: Drupal CMS
- 8. Open Source Discovery: VuFind • Faceted results • Live Record Status • “More Like This” • Enriched Content • Browse for Resources • Organize: save and tag! • Social Features: Tag & Comment • Friendly URLS - items, searches
- 9. Open Source Discovery: VuFind • Very active user community • Proven Technology - Examples of implementation abound • Level of Maturity (code & the project mgt) • SirsiDynix Development Community
- 10. Open Source Discovery: VuFind Implementation Customization Need: Configure Search Types
- 11. Open Source Discovery: VuFind Implementation Customization Need: Combine serial & journal items into one category
- 12. Open Source Discovery: VuFind Implementation Customization Need: Dewey Decimal Enabling
- 13. Open Source Discovery:VuFind Implementation - Custom Coding
- 14. Open Source Discovery: VuFind Implementation - Custom Coding
- 15. Open Source Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit The XC NCIP Toolkit allows clients to interact with an ILS for authentication requests, live circulation status lookups, and circulation requests. XC uses the NCIP standard protocol to accomplish this.
- 16. Open Source Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit NCIP Web Services implementation written in Java
- 17. Open Source Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit • Lookup User • Check In Item • Check Out Item • Accept Item
- 19. Open Source Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit The Code Has been open sourced...
- 20. Open Source Connectivity: The eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit • Active development community • Extremely responsive to my questions • Proven • Robust
- 21. Open Source Connectivity: NCIP Go-live
- 22. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS 10,194 Modules 1,147 Themes 8,737 Developers (as of 6/14/11). • web-based adminstration, updating • user community is strong, vigorous • modular and extensible (a slim powerful core, extensible through custom modules) • low resource (minimal, widely-available server-side requirements) • dynamic presentation of content
- 23. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS The Drupal Technology Stack • Nodes - any piece of content • Taxonomies - used for categories, organization • Views - use node attributes to build presentation The Drupal Aquarium
- 24. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS Dynamic content with nodes, taxonomies, views:
- 25. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS The Lehigh experience with Drupal: • Costs: implementation woes, steep learning curve, custom coding • Benefits: collaborative updating, in-page editing, reusable nodes, taxonomies, dynamic content, social features, powerful modules, integration with digital content ... Outcomes: Discovery and Empowerment!
- 26. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS Brief Tour of our Drupal site ...
- 27. Open Source Web Presence: Drupal CMS • Online and Local Groups: groups.drupal.org • Events and Meetups • Chat (IRC): irc.freenode.net • Planet Drupal: blog aggregator • Forums: http://drupal.org/forum • Mailing Lists • Drupal4Libraries! DRUPAL4LIB@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU, groups.drupal.org/libraries, drupal4lib interest group (LITA), Drupallib: http://drupalib.interoperating.info/ Where is the Drupal Community?
- 28. Conclusions about OSS: "Free Beer"? • Landscape of OSS is rich, diverse and maturing • Philosophically a good fit for libraries • Key Benefit: Community, Collaboration! • Offsetting costs in terms of infrastructure, development, support • Pragmatic approach may be best Questions? Experiences to share? "Stay thirsty my friends!"
Editor's Notes
- For the past several years, Lehigh Libraries has been on a pragmatic path of adopting feature-laden OSS into our academic library environment. This morning we will share the story of how we adopted three OSS for specific needs: discovery (VuFind), connectivity (eXtensible Catalog (XC) NCIP toolkit), and web presence (Drupal). What were our considerations and experiences? And what are our conclusions about how OSS fit into our enterprise?
- First, a few words about the philosophy of open source. Richard Stallman (a pioneer of the Free Software Movement) famously said that "free software" is a matter of liberty not price. "Free" means free as in free speech or free kittens .. NOT FREE BEER! As with "free kittens", software ownership requires responsibilities and costs ... What some term TCO - total cost of ownership...
- The GNU Project blazed the trail of open source software during the 1980's. The have defined "Essential Freedoms of Free Software" 1) Use the program for any purpose 2) Change the program to make it do what you wish 3) Redistribute copies of the program 4) distribute copies of your modified version (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) gnu - recursive acronym: GNUs not Unix
- The Open Source Movement and libraries share several common values – especially a belief in free and open access to ideas and information. Strengths of non-proprietary model: transparency of the code - you can modify or extend the code to fit your local circumstances. Also, Community and Collaboration: You can share your modifications with others. Best of all, other like similar sites can share their developments and improvements with you! Strength in numbers!
- Successful open source projects make up many of todays most widely used technologies
- In order to assess the viability of OSS for libraries, we need to be aware of "hidden costs". We will discuss these case by case, but generally the "costs" fall into these categories: Infrastructure - need to build and maintain your owns servers and testing environments. Development - OSS often require high learning curve, local development time and expertise. Support - When you face a challenge or service outage, support normally does not come from a vendor but from the OSS community. Can't just pick up the phone and call the vendor ..
- We would like to tell you about the implementation of three open source projects at Lehigh... over the past couple of years we've addressed the need for...discovery, connectivity and web presence... When we have a need for a software solution we will typically consider open source when analyzing our options. our open source software choices have been selective and made with caution... however, we've found the best success with open source projects that.... -are proven -have had multiple releases -have roadmaps -and strong/responsive development communities
- The first solution we would like to talk about is...Vufind....which is an open source discovery tool for libraries Vufind is not a new project...it has been almost four years since its first release. We - meaning all of us & our patrons -have come to expect an ease of use - a level of sophistication - 'online' VuFind allows us to provide that experience to our patrons. At this time...I would like to demonstrate the features of VuFind THIS IS OUR TEST SITE! We are currently testing VuFind internally with some of our library staff. We plan to go live in the Fall. DEMO HERE
- VuFind has an active & responsive user community In addition to the general VuFind developers...there is a community of developers that are SirsiDynix customers...this group has a list server and I will include the url for this list serve in the speaker notes: https://lists.lehigh.edu/mailman/listinfo/vufind-unicorn-l Both the code and the management of the VuFind project have reached a level of maturity. The project has been through several iterations...the most recent release was this past March (v1.1) The project team publishes a roadmap for future iterations...as well as a prioritization of ehancements/fixes. (Our version 1.0.1)
- Our implementation of VuFind involved both simple configuration settings as well as custom coding - to enable the communication with SirsiDynix Symphony. Much of what we wanted to do---bending VuFind to work with our catalog/ our MARC records we were able to do with configuration settings within the application. It's written to be very easily configured...and most times...when I found I needed to do something...to bend VuFind...I found that there was a configuration setting - not custom coding that was required- to allow me to do so. It gave me a sense...that someone had been 'here' before and the capability to make these things configurable has been built in....it's maturity really shines through.... I'll give you some examples....
- The custom coding we wrote, was primarily for the "My Account" functionality...like Place Hold or Renew Item. This diagram shows how the two systems integrate and - from a coding level - where the customizations were needed. The left side represents the VuFind code The right side represents the Sirsi API and Catalog. The Yellow boxes represent the custom code needed to connect VuFind to the Catalog. All of the custom PHP (and Perl) code will be open sourced.
- Custom HTML and CSS coding was done by our teams graphic designer. He made VuFind look like our Website...to provide -similar navigation/look and feel
- The next OSS we will address is the Extensible Catalog NCIP Toolkit. The Extensible Catalog (XC) is an open source, next gen software for libraries comprising four components: UI, Metadata Management, and ILS Connectivity: NCIP and OAI. The Mellon Foundation has been a primary sponsor .. Lehigh's interest in OSS NCIP was precipitated by a recent change in our consortial sharing agreement. Our New ILL vendor for our Pennsylvania Library Consortium (PALCI) required all participant institutions to make their ILS available via NCIP services. The XC NCIP toolkit does this with ILS authentication requests, circ lookups and requests ..
- The NCIP Toolkit is an implementation of NCIP Web Services written in Java.
- Lehigh however, did ...not need the to support the entire NCIP protocol..for this project...we needed to support just four of the services ...and not even the entirety of those four services were required by Relais lookup user check in item check out item accept item Before I get into any further into the details... I'm going to demonstrate our implementation of the toolkit... DEMO here... highlight user profile in response...
- I want to explain some of the technical details of the demonstration you just saw.... This diagram shows each step On left side...we have the EZ Borrow software - calling the NCIP serivces....similar to the way the .html demo page I just showed you...calls the Web Services... and on right side...we have the Catalog. In between...we have the NCIP Toolkit Core code...which takes care of the mechanics of the web services.. next to it in yellow...is the code we needed to write which takes care of the communication between the toolkit core code - The code written at Lehigh - the Symphony "Connector" - involved writing java code - --which extends the core toolkit functionality (to call the PERL scripts)...which make the direct api calls....
- All of the Java code -- the connector code that we wrote at Lehigh -- has been open sourced....committed to the XC Toolkit source repository...and the Perl scripts...with the API calls have been uploaded to the Sirsi API Website.
- The Extensible catalog organization holds bi-weekly (conference calls with project manager and other developers I can't say enough good things about the Project manager and other developers working on the Toolkit. They have been so responsive to my questions....and helpful and just all around nice folks to deal with. This project is proven... The NCIP Toolkit written for the first version of the NCIP protocol has been around for some time. ...just as our project was getting started...the Extensible Catalog released the Toolkit for NCIP version #2. We decided to implement version version 2...because the software vendor would support either version and we knew we would want to eventually be on the most up to date version of the protocol. T
- We started the project in November of last year...and went live in late March....since then...the services have been called approximately 4,000 without any downtime or issues. While that is not a terribly high volume, we have been extremely happy with the stability and performance.
- Our third story of OSS adoption is in the area of web presence - the Drupal CMS. In this arena (web CMS), Drupal is the 700lb gorilla in the ring - big and powerful, if not somewhat unruly ... Drupal has a very wide and high profile distribution (sites like the whitehouse.gov, the economist, scores of library sites) but a steep learning curve and Drupal can be difficult to implement .. Features we liked: web-based administration and updating. In-page editing, Decentralized admin .. user community -very strong, technical, high quality code. Extensibility - not "locked" into inflexible commercial software. Modularity - like building with lego blocks - you have wide choice of features to implement (e.g. LDAP, Friendly URLs, Rotating images, Google Analytics). Examples of our customizations: Library Hours, New Books/Videos lists. Dynamic Content: ability to feature variety of resources dynamically
- The Drupal Technology Stack: In the language of our previous slide - "low resource" - minimal, widely available server requirements. The Drupal Structure: less like the hierarchical tree - classic web design - than an "aquarium" Nodes: smallest elements of content: story, image, page, form, etc. Like the fish ... Taxonomies are used to categorize, organize Views are the way that node attributes or characteristics can be used to for dynamic presentation.
- Example of nodes, views, taxonomies in action: Our "For Faculty" and "For Students" blocks are built in "Views" using specific taxonomy terms to gather stories, resources, pages which are of particular interest to "Students" and "Faculty" particularly. We can use custom sorting to expire some resources chronologically while some nodes remain "sticky" and always at the top .. On the right is a screenshot of the webpage which is used to administer the "For Faculty" view ..
- The Lehigh experience has been "bitter" and "sweet". Costs: Design phase went considerably longer than we had hoped. Steep learning curve - CLIFF is a better word. You can forget everything you've learned about web design up till now ... Need for custom coding PHP skills to customize and extend .. Also, we maintain a production and test environment. Postitive Outcomes: Enhanced discovery and better access to our resouces for Patrons and empowerment for our Facutly and Staff to add and maintain content. We went "live" in January 2011 and are now considering version 2.0 improvements.
- Our website utitlizes a three panel display. The main navigation is across the top. Down the left panel, is another set of navigation - “Quick Links” - which provide easy access to essential library resources. “Popular Links” are generated dynamically according to user visits. The center panel of the page holds some constant and some dynamic content. The right panel is dynamically generated according to context.There is a discreet "admin login" at the bottom of the page which builds up an administration menu. The menu is modified according to user roles and permissions. Our contributors see mainly the sections for adding or administering content. Our administrators have other options for administering modules, blocks, themes, users, views, etc.
- There are a variety of way one can interact with the Drupal Community. There is also a very strong and active Drupal4lib group which sponsors meetups, conferences, a listserv etc. The highlight of our Drupal experience so far was attending the Drupal4lib Drupal Camp at NYPL last summer (2010). Some 40 institutions were represented and NYPL generously shared the narrative and technical details of their conversion to a Drupal site.
- Conclusions about OSS: Is there "Free Beer for Libraries?" The landscape of OSS is rich, diverse and maturing. While there are important philosophical reasons for libraries to support OSS - open code, open information - there are good practical reasons as well - extensibility, collaboration, quality code ... But there are offsetting costs in terms of infrastructure, development and support. Is is important to be aware of TCO considerations .. So, even from a sheerly pragmatic POV there are excellent opportunities for Libraries to benefit from - as well as contribute to OS. "Free Beer?", Perhaps not entirely free but there is very good beer in the "homebrew" market ..