Open Source Integrated Library Systems in Public Libraries

One of the most fundamental decisions a library makes is choosing an integrated library system, or ILS. A public library can remove unwanted outside influence and save money by switching their ILS to free and open source software, or FOSS. This article is an examination of the progress made by FOSS ILSs to become not only contenders against proprietary systems, but also an appropriate choice for financial, functional, and philosophical reasons. Included is a timeline of published evaluations, the milestone of 14% adoption, a summary of the current landscape, and example implementation cases. A functional analysis shows why a public library can now safely make the switch. A philosophical analysis shows why they should do so. Finally, a proposal is made to “Buy Back America’s Libraries, and return ownership of the keystone of our public information infrastructure to the people

Sustained Software for Cyberinfrastructure - Analyses of Successful Efforts with a Focus on NSF-Funded Software

Reliable software that provides needed functionality is clearly essential for an effective distributed cyberinfrastructure (CI) that supports comprehensive, balanced, and flexible distributed CI that, in turn, supports science and engineering applications. The purpose of this study was to understand what factors lead to software projects being well sustained over the long run, focusing on software created with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and/or used by researchers funded by the NSF. We surveyed NSF-funded researchers and performed in-depth studies of software projects that have been sustained over many years. Successful projects generally used open-source software licenses and employed good software engineering practices and test practices. However, many projects that have not been well sustained over time also meet these criteria. The features that stood out about successful projects included deeply committed leadership and some sort of user forum or conference at least annually. In some cases, software project leaders have employed multiple financial strategies over the course of a decades-old software project. Such well-sustained software is used in major distributed CI projects that support thousands of users, and this software is critical to the operation of major distributed CI facilities in the US. The findings of our study identify some characteristics of software that is relevant to the NSF-supported research community, and that has been sustained over many years

The Search for a New OPAC: Selecting an Open Source Discovery Layer

In early 2011, an Indiana University Libraries task force was charged with selecting an open source discovery layer to serve as the public interface for IU's online catalog, IUCAT. This process included creating a rubric of core functionality and rating two discovery layers based on criteria in four main categories: general features and functionality; authentication and account management; export and share; and search functionality and results display. The article includes information about our rubric and the two discovery layers reviewed, Blacklight and VuFind, as well as a discussion of the priorities of the task force. The article concludes with future steps and anticipated highlights for IUCAT

Analysis of the approaches of senior management teams towards adoption of next generation library management systems: case study of Cape Library Consortium Institutions

Sophistication of technology has resulted in libraries having to manage print, digital and electronic resources. Managing all resource types and formats with traditional integrated library systems is ineffective as the systems were designed for physical resources. Next generation library management systems are expected to change this by integrating all library resources and providing access through a single platform, reducing the number of transaction the user has to perform. Additionally libraries will save large proportions of their budgets on hardware and software, as the systems are accessed through a web browser this will be an added benefit for libraries as the cost of acquiring electronic resources is continuously increasing. Next generation library management systems are not yet implemented in academic libraries in the Western Cape Province. To investigate the reasons for this, the author employed a qualitative case study approach in which a minimum of two members of the Executive Management of each of the four Cape Library Consortium institutions were interviewed. Data collected was analysed using NVivo analysis software, responses being analysed within the institution and compared across the other institutions

Towards a Formalization of a Framework to Express and Reason about Software Engineering Methods

Software Engineering is considered a knowledge-intensive discipline, in which knowledge creation, collection and sharing is an uninterrupted process. However, a large part of this knowledge exists in a tacit form and depends on practitioners. Therefore defining a mechanism to transform tacit knowledge into explicit one is of upmost importance. This paper presents a formalization approach to represent Software Engineering practitioners' tacit knowledge, which is related to their ways of working, as a set of explicit statements. The formalization is based on KUALI-BEH, which is a normative kernel extension of ESSENCE formal specification, and consists of three parts: an ontology to share a common representation of knowledge as a set of concepts; a Situational Method Engineering based algebra that represents well-defined method properties and operations; and a knowledge representation of the ontology and algebra using Description Logics. The main objectives of this initial formalization are to improve communication among humans and machines, computational inference and reuse of knowledge