Guide to Google-competitive sources from Online Education Database

Do you think your local or university librarian uses Google? Sure, but certainly not exclusively. In order to start researching like a librarian, you’ll need to explore more authoritative resources…

Quoted from a guide put up on Online Education Database called “Research beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources”. The beginning paragraphs to explain the value of Google-competitive sources is brilliant.  But hey, according to trustworthiness of websites, why this sparse information about the origin of the website? Yes, I understand the purpose but who’s in charge? Okay, here’s a press release from PR Leap, says Jimmy Atkinson is the lead developer. Does he also update the website with content? Hmm, why this vagueness? It started September 19 2006 at least.

Colis 6 – a conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science held in Borås next year

Just discovered a Library and Information Science (LIS) conference called COLIS 6 – Sixth International conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science with theme title: “Featuring the Future”. It will take place in Borås, Sweden, in August 13-16, 2007. The conference themes are Reframing LIS from Different Perspectives, LIS in Contemporary Society, LIS versus New Research and Professional Fields
and New Research Methods in LIS.

Article on another open source library system called Evergreen

Thanks to Ronald van Dieën from Rotterdam, Netherlands, who pointed me to this article about the open source library system Evergreen called:”Librarians stake their future on open source“. Published 21 December 2006 at Linux.com.

A group of librarians at Georgia Public Library Service have developed their own open source library system which they call Evergreen and version 1.0 was released in november 2006. It’s written in C, JavaScript and Perl, licensed as GPL, runs on servers with Linux/Apache, uses a PostgreSQL database (Ohh, not swedish developed MySQL ;-) etc. Evergreen covers the GPLS’ network of libraries called PINES including 252 member libraries. You can try the PINES catalog.

PINES Program Director Julie Walker says to Linux.com:

“It has really been the easiest conversion I’ve ever been through in my 25 years of working in libraries,”

“Our Sirsi system ran on a great big Sun server that was quite expensive. We poured a lot of money into that over the years to continue to upgrade it, plus the housing of it was very expensive. [Evergreen] runs on a Linux cluster, which is a lot less expensive. Also, we’re not paying licensing fees anymore. When you’re talking 252 libraries, which is what we are today, that’s the great big savings.”

A study that PINES conducted in 2002 showed that if all of GPLS libraries would have to buy a new system, it would cost more than $15 million dollars, plus about $5 million dollars a year for maintenance. GPLS run PINES for a lean $1.6 million a year.

Librarian Brad LaJeunesse, PINES System Administrator with GPLS, says to Linux.com about another open source library system Koha:

“[Koha] wasn’t built with the scalability or deep organizational hierarchy that PINES requires. It would work fine for a 10-branch library system, but not for a statewide system.”

Good point if it’s applicable!

Blog on Linux for librarians

As you may have discovered I advocate the use of open source and Linux. Through Liszen, a Google co-op search engine searching library blogs, I found a blog with “…mission to introduce the value, utility, and versatility of Linux and open source software to library staff and administrators worldwide”. The blog is called Linuxlibrarian but I don’t find any information about the blogger.

Is Linux Unix?

“The differences between Unix and Linux is bigger than the similarities”

Writes Stefan Andersson from Redbridge in an article debate in swedish mag Computer Sweden from 13 December issue 126 2006.

“The Linux kernel is owned by a foundation, while the licenses of unix was soU and bought as any other product”.

“If a customer wanted to shift system 10 years ago it was an enormous project demanding new hardware, new operating system and new programs. The changed supplier could claimthat all software, for example clients, should be removed”.

“Today if the customer uses linux that shift is done easily because it’s possible to reuse hardware and most of all programs are binary compatible”.

“Customers have access to the open source and have been able to educate their own employees and develop the operating system”.

And remember “GNU’s not unix!” If you want to now more about the history of Unix and Linux I recommend the following two books: Rebel Code by Glyn Moody and The Unix philosophyMike Gancarz.

Tim Bray on XML in Linux journal

“I’m horribly unsatisfied and keenly aware of all the ways in which XML could have been better, mostly by being smaller and simpler. XML adressed a huge, painful problem (standardized machine-independent data format) at the right time, and it didn’t suck just enough, so it became the default solution”.

Said by one of the editors of the XML specification 1.0 Tim Bray in Linux Journal november 2006 issue 151.

But he also concludes to the pro of XML:

“…I’m happy that the world has bought into the notion of sending data around in a way that is thouroghky internationalized and radically independent of any programming language or operating system or hardware”.

Video tutorials for free image editing software GIMP

GIMP is a free image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, but they call GIMP an image manipulation program. GIMP works for a lot of operating systems like Mac, Windows and Linux but also FreeBSD and Solaris. I found some video tutorials for GIMP of different quality of course.

One is: “How To Make A Userbar In GIMP” It’s uploaded on Google Video.

You have some quicktime video tutorials on Gimp “Creating a Graduated ND-filter“, “Creating water drops“, “Full flare control” and “LAB color boost“. All video tutorials published at the blog SVDV-Photography.

You also have some video tutorials on GIMP at Designyourownweb.com. Totally 11 tutorials about all from installing GIMP to using Bezier tool, selection tools, transform tool, zoom, move, crop, layers etc.

There are more video tutorials out there. You can point out the more qualitative ones here by doing a blog comment.

Skanska have plans for Linux on clients

According to Computer Sweden 6 december 2006 Skanska is planning to use Linux on desktops at 700 construction site. Construction workers will have individual e-mail accounts and possibilty to surf the Internet. Then it also will be possible to do time reports in the enterprise system. The project manager thinks the education of the construction workers will not be that expensive. Instead Skanska will save a lot of money on not buying windows licenses. My question is: will they use Linux Ubuntu?

Screencast software for Linux Ubuntu

I use the screencast software Camtasia at my windows-hypnotized job. I looked for same kind of software for Linux Ubuntu and found this blog post Finally! Howto Screencast on Linux. The blogger says Wink gets more and more outdated and Istanbul is crashing on Ubuntu and he’s not either satisfied with xvidcap. Now, he suggets Recordmydesktop instead. Ubuntonista suggests ffmpeg in his blogpost. Here is a list of screen cast software for different OS at Wikipedia. Readers, what’s your experience of screencasting with Linux Ubuntu software?