Discussions to revisit

Not having as much time to read my listservs, I am going to note those things that I need to come back to. For instance, :this on web4lib concerning open source ILS's.

Bob looks at which U.S. public & academic libraries currently run open
> source ILS software, and how Koha and Evergreen usage stacks up.
>
> "There are a number of ways one might measure the impact of open
> source ILS software on U.S. public libraries but I think these
> preliminary figures are suggestive: that few of these libraries
> actually use open source software as a means of supplying their ILSs.
> Of course, we know that many more have announced and the market is
> dynamic. When I revisit these figures, I suspect the numbers will
> change but the size of the library market is quite a bit larger than
> the open source community has supplied. Its impact on the market is
> around 1%, depending on which measure one uses and by the restrictive
> criteria I use here."

Another slideshow from slideflickr

Driftwood

I've realized that the right side of this blog is becoming quite crowded with the stuff I'm picking up as I surf the internet (and, although that is an old, hackneyed phrase, I think it aptly describes the process of the to and fro-ing you do as you swing from link to link).

My latest finds come from trying to solve a problem with a Quick Link select list; the website managers would like the link selection to clear after the link is visited- the event handler is set to onChange. I haven't solved the problem (onClick works to a degree, but is kind of touchy) but in the course of trying to see if anyone else had a better idea, I took a look at all the UC websites.

Along the way, I got sidetracked by UCLA's very cool scrolling event sidebar, and tried to cut and paste it into a page to see how it works. Didn't succeed at all- there's more to it than meets the eye, but I will spend some time deconstructing it later. However, I did add the feed (way down at the bottom, because I really don't care what's happening at UCLA) just as a placeholder/reminder- it was generated as a widget from SpringWidgets, via the UCLA feed page, and is available in 8 different formats so you can add it to your blog, email it, send it to My Space, Friendster, Hi5 (never heard of that one), Xanga, or Google.

Forums, wikis, blogs

Here are two resources for creating forums (discussion groups- good for collaborative conversations):
phpBB: "Since its creation in 2000, phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution."
Informe.com, a free forum hosting site: "On the first day of 2007 we present you our free forum hosting service, Informe.com. Our project is powered by world's most popular forum engine, PhpBB, and we are not only providing you with the best PhpBB forum hosting service available, but also enhance the platform with ourself-developed mods available only on informe."

Karen Harker, on the web4lib list, gave an excellent summary of the appropriate uses of wikis, blogs and forums, which I am quoting here:

Since we have implemented both blogs and wikis for Library staff use, we have run into this problem often. These tools are quite different regarding communication modes and therefore do not work well for all roles. Here's a brief list that I use to decide on which tool to use:
-- Synchronous communication: Chat or VoIP
-- Near-synchronous: Email
-- Asynchronous and topical: Discussion forum
-- Asynchronous and primarily, but not solely, one-way: Blogs
-- Asynchronous and solely one-way: Private blogs
-- Collaborative Web site but not necessarily for communication: wikis

Blogs are not real good for true discussions...Discussion Forums (remember online bulletin boards) are much better at that. Blogs are good for regularly posting announcement-type info (alerts, links, funny stories, assignments, etc.), while allowing others to comment. This could be useful for "peer-reviews" of assignments, particularly related to creative writing or critical thinking.

code4lib

Interesting site, code4lib. I followed a link to a presentation given by Erik Hatcher for the Library of Congress on August 1, 2007 about Solr, a search engine for libraries, based on open-source Lucene.
In it he discusses the development of a new search engine utilizing the Java based Lucene open source software with Solr (originally developed by CNET, and open-sourced) layered above. The resultant product has caching, replication, faceting, hit highlighting, spell-checking and an htttp interface. It is being used at the Smithsonian, Internet Archive, Open Library, UVA (where Hatcher works) and Peel's Prairie Provinces.

IRC

This is probably old news but it was new to me, so IRC seems worth a mention. It's apparently something like IM. Here's what the IRC Primer, found on Code4Lib has to say:

IRC (original code was written by Jarkko Oikarinen) is a multi-user, multi-channel chatting network. It allows people all over the internet to talk to one another in real-time. It is a functional replacement and improvement to 'talk'; 'talk' is an old, primitive, atrocious, minimalist sort of keyboard/screen conversation tool, using a grotesque, machine- dependent protocol (blah!). IRC does everything 'talk' does, but with better protocol, allowing more than 2 users to talk at once, with access across the aggregate Internet, and providing a whole raft of other useful features.
IRC is based on a client-server model. Clients are programs that connect to a server, a server is a program that transports data, (messages), from a user client to another. There are clients running on many different systems, (Unix, emacs, VMS, MSDOS, VM...), that allow you to connect to an IRC server. The client which will be spoken of here is the most widespread: ircII, (originally designed by Michael Sandrof). Other clients are similar, and often accept ircII commands.
On IRC, there are a lot of places where you can "hang out"; those places are called 'channels', (most of the information in this section can also be obtained by issuing "/HELP CHANNEL"). You can compare conversations on a channel to a conversation among a group of people: you see/hear everything that is said, and you can reply to anything that's said. What you type is received by everyone who's willing to listen - and everyone who is late will not hear what was said before, unless repeated by one of the ones who were there. (Who said "real life" ?)

trying to get a photo into this thing

OK- that was hard- and it never did upload from the Flickr url, so I'm not sure what went wrong. Now will try to get this into my profile where it can live for all eternity- this was on a boat on Lake Tahoe- a lovely day.

Update: I did manage to put this into the profile, although not through the Flickr url. I cut and pasted the url from the blog into the profile- several times without success and then finally it added. It may be that Blogger was behaving badly, and not that I was doing something wrong since at one point, it crashed IE and closed.