stuff we do with oss in libraries (bergen, 2009)

BibLibre Presentation Template

The stuff we do with OSS in libraries

Nicolas Morin

[email protected]

Program

BibLibre

Koha: why was it a success in France so far?

Evergreen: short intro

Drupal:drupal/sopac

drupal/lucene/solr

BibLibre

BibLibre history

Early involvement in KohaPaul Poulain in 2002

Nicolas Morin as translator in 2003

Henri-Damien Laurent as developer in 2005

Paul Poulain R. Manager versions 2.x

Henri R. Maintainer version 3.0.x

BibLibre now

Incorporated oct. 2007

Headcount now 10:3 librarians

7 developers

Business in 6 countries in 2009

Turnover :x2 from 2007 to 2008

x2 from 2008 to 2009

We're growing as slowly as possible

What we do

We're not a koha vendor, we provide services for libraries with Open Source:

Koha

Evergreen

Drupal

On-demand development / Consulting

Why was Koha a success in France?

Koha (in France)

2002 : Internationalisation and norms (Unimarc)

2003 : 1st (small) libraries in France

2006 : 1st (bigger) public library in France (170.000 records) Mover&Shaker

2008 : 1st (bigger) university library in France (800.000 records)

Why is Koha a success in France?

Koha's a good product, and now mature

proprietary vendors misbehaving:ILS stops

vendor acquired by competitor

Feeling among libraries that products didn't really take on the web before it was too late

maintenance fees universally percieved as excessive and not providing value-for-money


We created a vendor!Without a vendor, OSS in libraries stays on the outskirts

Management issue : buy maintenance, cover your ass

Tech issues : Level of IT to become an expert on any given ILS is too big

Libraries tend to do OSS themselves when a commercial solution doesn't exist


a few militant libraries are pushing for an alternative relationship between libraries and vendors
-> kohala: French not-for-profit includes:developpers of Koha

users of Koha

people merely interested in Koha

=> not a one-to-one relationship between library and vendor


general evolution from IT as a set of tools to IT as a serviceA lot of the data is outside the library (Google, Elsevier, etc...)

On the web, tools age very quickly

-> requires a lot of Human ressources that libraries don't necessarily have-> OSS adapts well to this new situation : we don't sell a tool, we sell services


Koha tends to bring the price down :Cost of development shared

A lot of lightweight companies (little overhead costs)

We don't have bad habits nor VCs behind us and are often militants of OSS

vendors lower their prices in reaction


We do a lot of Community Work

H-D. Laurent (BibLibre): R. Maintainer 3.0

BibLibre runs mailing lists

BibLibre runs koha-fr.org (french community site)

BibLibre sponsors Nicole's work on documentation

=> Or : if you want to harness the power of the community, you have to give back


Market for IT in Libraries in France in 2008 : Down -7% at 42 m

open source IT projects : +75% from 2007

les temps demeurent cependant difficiles pour les petites et moyennes socits du secteur et pour quelques rares grandes entreprises qui narrivent pas faire face au dveloppement des logiciels libres. Marc Maisonneuve, Tosca, March 2009 (in LH 767)

Evergreen

Evergreen

Oct. 2009 : agreement to provide support for Evergreen and help Evergreen grow in Europe

Evergreen

Dev. Started 2004

live Sept. 2006 (PINES): 40+ PL systems, 250+ outlets

14+ million circs

statewide resource-sharing network

=> Designed to be robust and scalable=> http://open-ils.org/

Evergreen notable features

Rich, highly flexible policy control

Marc21 Holdings records (serials)

Clustering options (load balancing, failover, etc.)

Release 2.0 (2010) Acquisitions Second Release (including EDI support)

Serials

More language sets

Evergreen

Evergreen Academic or PL consortiaAugust 1, 2009December 31, 2009

Conifer44

Evergreen Indiana3852

Michigan Evergreen911

NTLC13

PINES5151

SC LENDS310

SITKA1830

Spruce11

Tsuga11

(Independent)45

Totals129178

Evergreen opac

Evergreen staff search

Evergreen staff circ

Drupal related stuff

Drupal

http://www.drupal.org

MySQL/PHP

Highly Modular & flexible / slightly complex

Good separation data / workflows / presentation

it's a CMS and a development framework

Drupal

Drupal

Drupal

SOPAC - What does it try to achieve?

http://thesocialopac.net

#1 perfect graphical integration between the catalog UI and the library's Drupal web site

#2 add social functionalities to the OPAC:tags

reviews

ratings

rss

#3: pools social data together (remote server - Insurge)

=> SOPAC replaces and enhances your OPAC

Sopac

Sopac

Limits of Sopac

Sopac perfect when used as is but...

Not fully integrated with DrupalRatings / comments coded in sopac

Web pages and biblio cannot share tags/comments/stars, etc.

2 search forms (sopac + drupal)

Display hardcoded in sopac (doesn't take advantage of drupal code views anyone?)

Doesn't interact with cool drupal modules like RDF, RSS, etc.

Limits of Sopac (2)

Search engine (sphinx)Facets are hardcoded

Some functionalities missing (more like this)

Items and subjects managed within biblio

=> not integrated in Drupal vs Drupal dependent

Work on Drupac

PositivesLucene / solr (see blacklight, VuFind, etc...)

Each record a web page (CCK fields)

Uses drupal modules (stars, comments, etc)

Uses drupal Views to create different views of records

Negatives sharing of social aspects (Insurge) lost for the time being (wasn't used yet in Sopac)

Drupal dependant (eh, we like this, actually; is that a negative?)

Work on Drupac

Lucene/solrSpellchecker

Suggestions (did you mean...?)

Facets

Work on Drupac

Work on Drupac



Facets

Field weighting

Work on Drupac

Work on Drupac



Facets

Field weighting

Index definition

Work on Drupac

Work on Drupac



Facets

Field weighting

Index definition

Drupal Views

Work on Drupac

Drupac

Drupac

Very flexible

Can scale

Code quality and maintainability + : reuse of Lucene / solr /drupal code

Conclusion

OS solutions for libraries :Small libraries big libraries

Use as is custom stuff

Fairly usual (ILS) advanced stuff (lucene/solr)

Thanks for listening.Questions? Objections? Remarks? Contributions?

[email protected]

stuff we do with oss in libraries (bergen, 2009)

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