About Time!

Yeah!

This is a very interesting article on the recent movement in libraries to hire and maintain full time software developers to handle the e needs of cataloging collections. Long outsourced the waste and frustration of living with and depending on databases not designed under the direct supervision or by librarians is changing. There is some reason for the complaints which have been so common. While the third party solutions have been a crutch, a movement to resolve these issues in the profession has been slow in development. As Andy Guess points out in this article:

Still, some libraries, fed up with software that doesn’t fully meet their needs, have decided to take matters, figuratively, into their own hands. With a bit of grant money and some eager developers, institutions have begun creating their own open-source solutions that are fully customizable, free for others to use and compatible with existing systems. The result has been a whole crop of projects that, when combined, could serve as a fully integrated, end-to-end open-source solution for academic libraries, covering the interface, search mechanism, database system, citations and even course management.


Meanwhile, the increasing availability of open-source software has nudged some libraries to reconsider the role of their in-house technology gurus, and to wonder whether it would make more long-term financial sense to hire more developers than to continue paying for products over which they have limited control.

The name of the game is open source and saving money. It's all about finding solutions that work and will not lead to crippling investments and subscription and maintenance fees. For example:

Open-source Web catalogs like VuFind tend to look a lot like search engines that people who work online are already used to. VuFind (and, eventually, XC) adds Web 2.0 functionality on top of the traditional interface, allowing users to e-mail search results and save results to their favorites. One feature Nagy said was a high priority for library developers is “faceted navigation,” which allows users to drill down and refine searches by, for example, author, topic or format. The VuFind interface is also completely compatible with the open-source citation management tool Zotero, a plugin for the Firefox browser.


Another piece of the puzzle is federated search: an engine that sifts through numerous different databases for each user query. One tool being developed at Oregon State University, LibraryFind, combines federated search with a simple, Google-like interface that lets users sort by relevance, save items, refine searches and view electronic documents.



Any thoughts?



Here is the link to the story:



http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/opensource