Anti-open source document from SirsiDynix leaked

Awesome librarian Jessamyn West at Librarian.net is blogging about an anti-open source document from SirsiDynix corp. available from WikiLeaks. About the document:

“This document was released only to a select number of existing customers of the company SirsiDynix, a proprietary library automation software vendor. It has not been released more broadly specifically because of the misinformation about open source software and possible libel per se against certain competitors contained therein”.

From the document I have find a lot of interesting statements:

“…it should be noted that it is rare for completely open source projects to be successful. Rather than focusing on best-in-class software choice decision-making, these projects often end up being archipelagos of systems driven by a philosophical principle that is anti-proprietary”.

Apache, Linux, Firefox, Drupal, WordPress… Need we say moore?

“..the number of Linux desktops is meager compared to Microsoft Windows desktops. By choosing a Linux desktop, a user closes the door on some software because it may never be created for or ported to Linux. Add to this the major changes in allied systems that require an adaptation for the ILS and the issue grows exponentially”.

Times are a-changing…

“While some open source ILS companies are offering hosted solutions, these solutions are not at the scale or professionalism of a proprietary SaaS solution, nor do they provide the service level agreements or service expectations that SirsiDynix commits to”.

Was that adressed to LibLime and others? Or even Acquia for Drupal or Canonical for Ubuntu?

“Generally, the available open source ILS platforms have less than half of the features and functions of any SirsiDynix ILS”.

It took at least 2 years for ExLibris to implement an usually common option in their Aleph system that I know a programmer could have fixed in less than a day.

“Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly”.

WordPress is veeeery user-friendly. SharePoint is not user-friendly. RT is not user-friendly. Mac OS is user-friendly. It’s not about proprietary or open source when coming to user-friendliness.

“SirsiDynix consultants have written custom API programs since the company introduced the Application Programming Interface (API) nearly 20 years ago”.

I read at swedish library blog Betabib this observation from the conference Computers in libraries 2009:

“He [Stephen Abram] addressed the issue of SirsiDynix longtime experience of API:s. But when talking to some of their customers they looked at me questioning”.

Even more from the document:

“Some of the most security-conscious entities, like the United States Department of Defense, restrict the use of open source software for fear that it could pose a terrorist opportunity”.

Why did the White House choose open source Drupal? Aren’t they afraid of terrorists?

“Finally, one of the biggest claims of open source proponents is that it is more reliable. They argue that since any programmer can find and fix bugs, the software will be repaired and improved more quickly. There is, however, no guarantee that the bug you want fixed will engage a member of the community to fix it”.

Maybe the IT folks at the White House think they can fix bugs better and even faster within in the community than behind the walls of a proprietary software corporation?

From the end of this document.):

“We’ve [SirsiDynix] led the development of some of the most advanced features and capabilities of ILS platforms. So we know a thing or two about what it takes for library systems to be successful. While we encourage the development of open formats, we must discourage libraries from jumping headlong into an open source platform to operate their ILS system on. At the current production cycle, jumping into open source would be dangerous, at best”.

Every ILS solution is more or less dangerous to speak SirsiDynix language. It’s just that it I like when I can see what is dangerous and share this dangerousness within an open community. Thanks WikiLeaks!

White House changes CMS to Drupal

Just read at AP (via Huffington Post) that the White House has changed CMS to Drupal and yes, I knew we did the right thing when choosing Drupal for our new library website at Umeå UB ;-) Joking aside, we decided platform about a year ago and we hope to launch the site in a couple of months. One of the great things beside of Drupal being open source LAMP is the community: very active and big. I already know Karlstad University Library is using Drupal and KIB is on their way, already using it for their Intranet. Talking of libraries in Sweden. Lots of libraries in US already use it.

I also read in a Drupal Groups discussion that U.S. White House launched recovery.gov with Drupal earlier this year February 17. And read a blog post at Lullabot explaining how to figure out if a website is running Drupal or not.

Chris Wilson thinks running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster and explains it with five statements: Drupal knows best, Drupal is disorganized, Drupal is righteous, Drupal is impenetrable, Drupal hates change.

Let’s see what he complains about:

“The apologists will tell you that, once you scale the learning curve, it gets much easier. This is probably true, but a lot of ordinary, code-fearing people who just want a simple Web site are getting left behind”.

Yes, there is a learning curve but I’m sure the learning curve will be a bit lower with Drupal 7? Has he tried that? The development of Drupal 7 is focused a lot on the usability problems. Lot of open source projects have great problems with the usability design but that doesn’t mean proprietary software also has. I think WordPress is a great example of teriffic usability design and it’s open source. Maybe Drupal in version 7 is reaching their level. Maybe the IT staff at White House will contribute to this usabilty efforts.

More from Wilson:

“Instead of displaying your pages in folders that you can browse, like you do on your personal computer, Drupal provides a nightmarish content list. To find what you’re looking for, you have to search for it.

Yes, I do agree that the content list is not optimal but at least in Drupal 7 you can sort columns.

“…it [Drupal] remains a religion. If you went to DrupalCon in Paris last month, then you would have almost certainly come across proselytizers of one the movement’s fundamental tenets: Drupal doesn’t break Web sites. People with Drupal break Web sites. Most problems with Drupal stem from people who “don’t get it” or aren’t using it correctly”.

Open source projects has a tendency to become religions but you don’t need to be a dedicated Drupalist to use Drupal and go to the confs. You can swear in front of your screen at your Drupal installation and you could ask the the critical questions at confs. All Drupalists will not damn you for that. Some get religious but that doesn’t mean all Drupalists become that.

“Drupal’s defenders are eerily reminiscent of those movement Democrats who were constantly knocking at your front door in the summer of 2008″.

Heh, haven’t met them in Sweden ;-) but I like what they did: moving Bush out in the desert.

Tim O’Reilly in his Radar has lot of interesting reflections on Drupal for White House and is quite positive IMO:

“…I suspect that simply using open source software won’t slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts”.

Though he thinks White House should be better on contributing to the Drupal community:

“…the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option. Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I’ll be looking for”.

Screencast software Camtasia soon for Mac

I was checking for screencast software for Mac and discovered Camtasia will be available for Mac users at August 24th.

I’ve been using Camtasia for making screencasts at my work for a couple of years now. I’ve also “travelled” back to the world of mac (11 years since I left) as I now own an iMac and I can say I don’t regret the purchase. We’ll see if Camtasia is better than iShow. Look at this screencast in this blog post from Techsmith. Anyone with experience of iShow or other Mac screencast software?

Drupal-supporting Acquia with quadrupled customer base

Acquia, which business model is to support open source Drupal, has quadrupled their customer base in the last six months. For you who don’t know about Drupal it’s an open source CMS originally created by Dries Buytaert from Belgium. Dries got his PhD in 2008 from the University in Gent and then founded Acquia which are supporting Drupal with support and services. Dries wrote last week on his blog about Acquias business model:

“The reality is that with less than one year into the Drupal support business, it is too early for us to tell if the support business model will be viable for Drupal. We need many more customers before we’ve built a scalable business; however, the early signs are good and beat our expectations”.

I met Robert Douglass at the Swedish Drupalcamp in May and on behalf of his talk about the Apache Solr module I discussed the idea of building a meta-search (Apache Solr) module that would benefit any library on this planet using Drupal. We’ll see what happens but this year I have to launch the new Drupal web site at our library at the Umeå university with a metalib/API/Xerxes solution.

Video from Drupalcamp in Stockholm Sweden May 29-30 2009

I attended the Drupalcamp in Stockholm, Sweden, last weekend and most funny was the Drupal puppy. Watch this Video ’cause it’s awesome:

Update: You’ll also find it at the Nodeone blog.

Launch prototype of Crunchpad lightweight web tablet

The launch prototype of the lightweight web tablet Crunchpad is now possible to get a view of at TechCrunch. The CrunchPad project started in July 2008 and was created by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, Louis Monier and Singapore based design studio FusionGarage.

Zoli Erdos at Cloudave says:

“…I want my CrunchPad slim, lightweight, with just a flash drive, good enough screen and memory to quickly pull up a browser and nothing else: everything else is in the Cloud”.

I agree, but I wonder if it’s suitable for reading offline ebooks also?

Microblogs like Twitter in organizations and enterprises

I’m working with conferences and web in a Swedish organization for information specialists: SFIS.nu and it’s an emerging debate about using social media and especially microblogs for sending out information. Last autumn at SFIS autumn conference 2008 I used Jaiku for sending out information and news about new speakers and so on. An evaluation afterwards showed that at least one person registered for the conference when getting the information in Jaiku.

The other day I read a blog post by Fredrik Wass at Bisonblog about personalization of Twitter-profiles from organization and enterprises.

His example is from Bay to Breakers in San Francisco using Twitter. Amy Johnson with the usernamne INGB2Bbreakers added him in Twitter and he also started to follow Amy. According to Fredrik the follwing twittering from Amy showed that it worked out very well to combine the organization with the person and he felt it more genuine to have contact with a real person (even if it’s hard to check the real existence of Amy). He summarizes (my simple translation;-):

“This shows how PR at Twitter should work. I as customer or just interested is twittering about the enterprise/organization. They find me and react to my message, without pushing a product. When I show my interest they have a real person answering my questions”.

I recieved a Twitter follow message from Headweb the other day.

I like Headweb. They are doing great non-DRM things and they care even for linux users. But first I thought this is just another unpersonalized Twitter-sending-out-some-stereotype-press-releases -prepared-by-a-PR-firm. But checking the Profile I got a name behind Headweb: Peter Alvarsson. No photo? Ok, it’s up to Peter, but I’m now a follower of Headweb Twitter-profile and I know I will buy something from Headweb in the future.

Ubuntu 9.04 booting in 17.5 seconds, according to MattCutts

According to Matt Cutts at Google Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is booting in 17.5 seconds (from pressing power to Firefox excluding 5 seconds for BIOS display on a Thinkpad) with SSD hard-drive Intel X25-E Extreme. Look at his live documentation at YouTube:

And if you let Windows 7 compete with Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 (this video is not from Matt Cutts!):

Today Daniel Forsman at Jönköping University Library is talking at the conference Computers in Libraries 2009 (abr. CIL 2009) in Arlington, Virginia, U.S.

I just been looking up some documentation of the conference and found the Twitterstream at hashtag #CIL2009.

An interview at Vimeo with Lee Rainie from Pew Internet with interviewer Jaap van De Geer:

If more interesting documentation from CIL 2009 just make a note of it in the commentary section.

Tim Bernes-Lee about semantic web, raw data and linked data

I hope you haven’t missed Tim Berners-Lee prophetical talk at Ted.com about the semantic web, raw data and linked data. The title of his speech is: “The next Web of open, linked data“:

I couldn’t neglect to show a slide from his talk in my own talk with Lars Våge about the semantic web (swe. semantiska webben) and web 3.0 which subject is the next hype lecture topic in the library and information specialist branch.

The meaning of social network sites for libraries

I haven’t studied the literature about social network sites much and libraries but I stumbled on this article: Academic Libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and Student Outreach: A Survey of Student Opinion by Ruth Sara Connell in portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2009), pp. 25–36.

The Valparaiso University Library, outside Chicago, surveyed 366 first-year students during January-February 2008: “…to discover their feelings about librarians using Facebook and MySpace as outreach tools”. Here’s a conclusion extracted from the article abstract:”Most indicated that they would be accepting of library contact through those Web sites, but a sizable minority reacted negatively to the concept. Because of the potential to infringe on students’ sense of personal privacy, it is recommended that librarians proceed with caution when implementing online social network profiles”.

The students were asked if they had a profile on Facebook (338 out of 366) and MySpace (151 of 366). 190 had Facebook but not MySpace and 145 had both. They were asked if they would add the library or librarian as a friend. The majority of respondents (211 or 57.7 percent) said that they would not be proactive about it, but if the library friended them, they would accept the friend invitation.

The were also asked: “how would you feel if the library tried to send you announcements and communicate with you via Facebook and/or MySpace?” More students (156 of 366) answered that they would be more receptive to information received in this way than any other response. The second most commonly given answer (134 or 36.6 percent) was that “I would not pay attention but not mind this communication.”

Other comments from the survey, negative and positive:

“I think this is a really good idea because students check Facebook and MySpace before Groupwise campus e-mail system…”

“It’s probably not worth your time unless the library does new and exciting things”.

“Facebook is to stay in touch with friends or teachers from the past. E-mail is for
announcements. Stick with that!!!”

Beside of the Valparaiso survey the article is a nice review of some of the literature within the subject. Here is some extracts:

“Students are far less concerned with privacy than many librarians assume they are”. Source: Daniel Mack et al., “Reaching Students with Facebook: Data and Best Practices,” Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship 8, 2 (Summer 2007),

“A big difference exists between being where our patrons are and being
useful to our patrons where they are. A profile should be designed to offer something
to patrons, so they will keep coming back to it.” Source: Meredith Farkas, Social Software in Libraries (Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2007).

When reading this interesting article I thought of the very small survey we made the Umeå University Library in spring 2007, before the Facebook-fever outreach, asking library visting students randomly about their thoughts of the library website building their own web 2.0 services like recommendation tools, forums, private profiles etc. (like the pioneering web 2.0 library at the public library of Umeå).

Nearly every respondent, it was a VERY small survey though, didn’t see any meaning for the library to build their own web 2.0 applications, though some kind of personalization was appriciated like save my search history, my journals and databases.

OCLC and their future in Sweden

Actually, I’m quite new to what OCLC can offer libraries in Sweden. Though I think the step from LIBRIS Sweden to OCLC the world (or should I say U.S.?) has it’s possibilities. I’ve always thought every possibility for the Swedish libraries to cooperate outside the Swedish frontiers is good and should also be a goal in itself. But of course we can’t sell our souls.

Daniel Forsman, one of the most progressive librarians working with the Digital Library concept in Sweden, has written about the OCLC question at Betabib swedish librarian blog. I just discovered Jeffrey Beall, Metadata librarian and Assistant Professor, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver, when I searched articles about Dublin Core when preparing a lecture for BIV. His great article was: “Dublin core: an obituary“. I also found articles about the weaknesses with fulltext searching. Great, I still fight against Googlealgoguys and propagate for metadata and thesauri and his articles gives me some petrol.

I also found an article about OCLC he wrote last year and meantioned it for Daniel. Then also found Rick Mason’s blog post where he opposes Jeffrey. I haven’t dived into this discussion yet but I will because since 1 December 2008 I’m working for the web team at the Digital Library department at Umeå University Library and this important issuses for swedish digital libraries.

I will just translate some of Daniels thoughts from his blogpost at his swedish blog Betabib:

“I’m an eager proponent of sharing our data in as many places as possible and OCLC is a player in the market we can’t ignore. If it’s primarily about giving our users better access to a big amount of bibliographic records it seems WorldCat is better than for example LIBRIS. If you count records. But sure if you give, you should get some repay and when it comes to repaying I think OCLC have things to work on. For example I think it’s obviously that we should have access to the OCLC API for WolrdCat if our items are registered there”.

Here you can find information about: “National Library of Sweden and OCLC networking event“. The discussion is only in it’s infancy, at least in Sweden ;-)

Update: Check out the 10 minute video:”WorldCat Local: All of Your Library’s Content in One Search Box“.

Canonical link element solves duplicate content problem

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have all together launched a tag for solving problems with duplicate content. Instead of an ugly link something like this http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf31415ihijkjuk454 you can use this in your code, in the HEAD part, to point out the canonical link:

<link rel=”canonical” value=”http://example.com/page.html”/>

Read about duplicate links at Google Webmaster Central blog, Yahoo Search blog, Live Search Webmaster Center blog. You also have a help instruction about canonical pages at Google help.

The value of click-stream data derived from toolbars

Reading Greg Lindens blog is always pleasent if you want to dive deeper in the knowledge of search engines. In his last post he refers to an article by Jan O. Pedersen et al at Yahoo! called “Making sense of search result pages” [PDF] (published in a academic digital archive, not a peer-reviewed journal).

“Search engine query logs only reflect a small slice of user behavior – actions taken on the search results page. A more complete picture would include the entire click stream; search result page clicks as well as offsite follow-on actions”.

Yes, I’ve always been critical to the importance of query log data and click-stream data is of course a good expansion to quantitative studies on search beahvior. But, I think the heavy dependency on this kind of quantitative data is just an expression of the laziness of search engines to not use more qualitative research methods. For example naturlistic inquiry. Yes, it’s not possible to get data from as many users as in query log analysis, but I think the mix is important. Actually, I’m not quite sure how much qualitative reasearch search engines do today but among usability engineers it’s a matter of course.

But Pedersen also comment eye tracking:

“Ultimately a direct measurement of what the user perceives on a search results page would be most useful. A closely proxy of this ideal is measuring eye movement and fixations across the page followed by user interviews. Aggregate measures reveal which page elements get the greatest attention, while tracking individual sessions is very revealing about scanning behavior”.

User interviews! Good qualitative research, but not always easy. But remember what Jared Spool said about eye tracking in: “Eyetracking: worth the expense?“.

More of mixing quantitative data with qualitative in web search behavior research. This scientific field is overwhelmed by query log analysis papers.

Employer attitudes to social media

I often hear from library collegaues working at company libraries or some governmental libraries that: “we’re not allowed to use this or that web appplication because…” Yes, because what?

Just read a great column in a recent Econtent magazine issue with title: “Trust Your Employees (Or Fire Them)”, written by David Meerman Scott. Great readings! He says:

“I estimate that more than 25% of companies block employee access to YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites”.

What I heard from people I met they can’t use for example Skype, Gmail, Facebook, not even allowed to install anything else than what the data technician are allowed to install of all that property software, so goodbye Google Earth, Skype etc. etc. So, what are the reasons. David lists four reasons. Often people don’t know the reason and if they know they always say it’s because of security issues. Reason 2 in David’s article. But actually I think it’s often because employer’s think it’s a drain to productivity (reason 1), though blame it on security issues and that way puts the responsibility to argue with employees at the IT department. Exactly as David points out:

“I think the big issue here is really one of trust, and the things listed by company representatives as dangers are just excuses”.

Gosh, I must give my employer at Umeå university a big hug! I don’t know since how long I have been allowed to install software, allowed to use any social media site I prefer. Because of this possibility I very early for example was able to evaluate Facebook (and then block all what I think stupid applications), switch to tremendous Gmail (with splendid IMAP) that saved so much time for my e-mail managing no other e-mail client or service ever did, Skyping fast, easy, cheap with headset, I’ve discovered the golden power of microblogging for information sharing.

That’s why I’m able to have talks and workshops for these retricting companies telling them about the power of social media and other usable web applications. They look at me like they were farmers still using horses, trying to understand tractors which their landlord block them to try.

To worried employer’s David says:

“My recommendation to organizations is simple: Develop guidelines about what employees can and cannot do at work”.

To irritated employees David says:

“If you’re an employee who works for a company that blocks access, I suggest you become an agent of change. Give your bosses a copy of this column”.