Science Library Pad

Google Summer of Code 2006

If your organization has been trying to find a way to get some neat code developed, the Google Summer of Code 2006 may help.

5. What are the eligibility requirements for mentor organizations?

Mentor organizations must be organizations or individuals running an active and viable open source or free software project whose applications are approved by Google's Open Source Program Office. ...

15. How are payments structured?

Google will provide a stipend of 5000 USD per student developer, of which 4500 USD goes to the accepted student applicant and 500 USD to the mentoring organization upon successful completion of a project. Students will be paid 500 USD upon acceptance of their application to the program, 2000 USD mid-program provided sufficient progress has been made on their project, and 2000 USD at close of program provided their project has been completed.

from Summer of Code: Mentor FAQ

as seen on Slashdot Summer of Code 2006 is On /.

SOA Web Services conference + AJAX

I don't know how good this is, but for what it's worth

The 10th International SOA Web Services Edge Conference, colocated with the First Annual Enterprise Open Source Conference, will take place on June 5-6, 2006 at the historical Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. ...

This year, more than 100 distinguished conference faculty members will present 96 cutting-edge SOA, Web Services and Enterprise Open Source topics in educational classes, panels, and keynotes in six simultaneous tracks for two information-packed days, plus a bonus track, a "Real-World AJAX" two-day seminar

OpenOffice Bibliographic Project

The bibliographic project will design and build an easy to use and comprehensive bibliographic facility within OpenOffice. It will be easy to use for the casual user, but will meet all the requirements of the professional and academic writer. The new bibliographic facility will utilise the latest open standards and will make the fullest use of emerging XML, XSLT, RDF and SRU/W technology.

http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/

I think this might be a promising central point for collaboration in the area of bibliographic integration with software.  Since you need the citation information in your document composition environment, why not just build bibliographic capabilities right in?

UPDATE

Bruce D'Arcus of the Geography Department of Miami University is the co-project leader. He has a blog.

A couple interesting postings from his blog:

• December 17, 2005  Citation Metadata Workflow
• January 28, 2006  A Model for Citation Metadata

His blog leads me to discover there is a HubMed Blog - Hublog, with a posting from December 17, 2005 Academic Metadata Workflow.

ENDUPDATE

via JISC Middleware for Distributed Cognition

SOA presentations from ObjectWeb

ObjectWeb - Program - Service-Oriented Architecture

This session [was] devoted to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with special emphasis on open source middleware platforms that support SOA. ...

• Open Source Middleware for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Adrian TRENAMAN, Iona (PDF) [gives overview, then talks about open CORBA, ESB and JMS open source]
• Building an SME ecosystem workbench with PETALS Services Plaftorm, Jean-Pierre LORRE, EBM (PDF)
• SCA specification and programming model, Mike Edwards, IBM (PDF) [talks about Service Component Architecture, the latest flavour of SOA]

First Monday CFP - Openness: Code, science and content, also conference

while open source software — due to its strong impact on business and on bridging the digital divide — has drawn much attention, it may provide false hopes for the sustainability of openness in other areas of content that need careful examination. The conference FM10 Openness: Code, science and content — Making collaborative creativity sustainable provides a platform for such analysis and discussion, resulting in concrete proposals for sustainable models for open collaboration in creative domains.

The conference will draw on the experience of First Monday as the foremost  online, peer–reviewed academic journal covering these issues since May 1996. Not only has First Monday published numerous papers by leading scholars on the topics of open collaboration, open access, and open content in its various forms, it is itself an example of open collaboration in practice: for nearly a decade, the journal has been published on a purely voluntary basis, with no subscription fees, advertising, sponsorship or other revenues. The success of First Monday is demonstrated by thousands of readers around the world, downloading hundreds of thousands of papers each month. This conference celebrates First Monday’s tenth anniversary.

We invite papers for the conference and for a very special issue of First Monday. These papers will be reviewed by a special conference editorial committee. Authors of selected papers will be invited to the conference, scheduled to take place at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 15–17 May 2006. The conference is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (http://www.macfound.org/) and the Open Society Institute (http://www.soros.org/). Other selected papers will be published in a special issue of First Monday, to appear in June 2006.

Papers should address the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content. They can examine technical, sociological, economic/business and legal issues, and can be conceptual or practical in nature.

FM10 Openness: Code, science and content

CFP deadline 6 February 2006
completed papers by 1 May 2006

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

Apache open source Web Services stuff

I couldn't remember the name of one of the Apache projects at SOA Symposium, which maybe tells you what kind of presence it has.  I kept thinking "synergy" but it's actually Synapse

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/SynapseProposal

It did get tons of press

http://www.google.ca/search?q=apache+synapse

unfortunately I'm not sure that

1. it exists in any substantial form yet
2. I understand what it is supposed to do

There is also of course Apache Axis, which lives with a bunch of other related Web Services projects at

http://ws.apache.org/

electronic info for libraries General Assembly 2005

eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) is an interesting organization of developing countries.

Their General Assembly 2005 just took place this year in Lithuania.  Topics included open source, open access and Google Scholar.  Mark Leggott reports:

I have been in Vilnius Lithuania for the last 5 days working with the members of a great library group called eIFL. Art Rhyno and I gave an all-day workshop on open source (Art did all the work) and we then participated in a couple of days of conferencing. It was a very good set of sessions but more importantly, it is a great group of people. In fact, it is the only other event I have attended that had a feel similar to Access. A close-knit group with a passion for the issues they are meeting to discuss with an opportunity to enjoy themselves. The group has representation from about 50 member countries, mostly from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Much of the sessions were concerned with things open, so I really felt at home. What I particularly noticed was that the group is very keen to make use of open source and open content and is very savvy about the technology and issues - more, I suspect, than many people in North America would think.

Previously:
2005-Feb-05  eIFL Open Access project

LibX Firefox Extension Framework for Libraries

This is great to see: a framework with all the pieces you need to build Firefox extensions for your own libraries.

LibX - Firefox Extension for Libraries

Ongoing  We are currently looking for libraries that are interested in adapting, evaluating and possibly deploying LibX.  Librarians: if your library uses Millenium, Horizon, or Voyager, getting your own edition of LibX can take as little as 15 mins, and we are willing to help you set it up.  We will add other OPACs as there is interest.

LibX was created by Annette Bailey and Godmar Back.
I think this is a great development.

via LibSuccess - Web Browser Extensions

ILI2005 - Tuesday 11th - Using Open Source and Open Standards to Extend Proprietary Systems

Disclaimer: I work at CISTI.

  Glen Newton 
  Originally uploaded by mstephens7.

A good picture of Glen giving his presentation, taken by Michael Stephens.

Using Open Source and Open Standards to Extend Proprietary Systems

Glen Newton, CISTI
Michael Fortin, Concordia University (co-op student)

Initial solution
- PHP
- Z39.50
- could be embedded into CMS
- due to Z39.50 problems, used Yaz Proxy
http://www.indexdata.dk/yazproxy/
- implemented using Linux, Apache, PHP 5

[slide of interface for initial solution]

results interface is simpler than the direct catalogue interface

Extensions
* moved to Ajax
* search other Z39.50 databases
* search PubMed using HTTP REST
* search Amazon using Web Services
* use Web Services to get cover art from Amazon []
* search our own metadata database (MySQL)

[slide of interface for extended solution]

basically the interface presents the search with different tabs for each service,
so you get e.g. a search for "cell" on CISTI catalogue, PubMed, Amazon

Conclusion

turned into almost a federated search

* Success due to integration of open standards and open source
* Could have been done using non open source, at greater cost
* Would prefer to have used Innovative XML Server instead of Z39.50

See CISTI Lab.

Q from Brian Kelly: Ajax is making an application inside of a web browser, what are the CLF issues.
A: Amazon.ca may offer both English and French.  Within the browser Ajax is still building HTML / XHTML
so you can still comply...
Q from Brian: but Ajax depends on JavaScript, which ? violates CLF ?

Internet Librarian International 2005

In one week I will be at Internet Librarian International 2005 - Transcending Boundaries:
Information Technologies & Strategies for the 21st Century.
(UPDATE: Just to be clear, this is the UK version of the conference, held in London, England.)

I will be doing a 15 minute presentation on Monday October 10, 15:15-15:30
Session C104 – How to Enhance Access with Browser Extensions in
Track C: Global Best Practices.

As reference I will be using the LibSuccess Wiki page on Web Browser Extensions for Libraries that Gianluca Drago and I have put together (along with others - please don't hestitate to contribute).

My colleague from CISTI, Glen Newton, will be presenting with Brian Kelly on Tuesday October 11, 13:45 – 14:45
Session B203 – Using Open Standards and Open Source Software in
Track B (afternoon): Technology for Libraries.

I have created an unofficial wiki for the conference at
http://ili2005.xwiki.com/
You can also blog there if you want by entering a title in the "Add a Blog Entry" box in the left-hand side column, keep in mind that you need to use XWiki syntax within the blog portion as well.
So far, the participation level in this wiki has been very low, I will be interested to see whether there are actually very many additions.  It is additional overhead to run an open wiki due to the need to clean up any spam and defacement.

You can read more about the features I have added to the wiki in my previous posting.

I will probably be raw-blogging the conference here under category/tag ILI2005.
I may post summaries to the wiki.

I have pulled some placemarks for Google Earth from searches:
Download CopthorneTaraHotel-London.kmz
Download HighStreetKensingtonStation-London.kmz
As you can see, Google Earth has good searching for UK info, so you can just e.g. enter a hotel name or tube station while zoomed in on London and it should be able to find it.

I found the Google Earth view to be useful for my previous trip to Copenhagen, but mainly in terms of the relative positions of things.  I found it hard to get a good sense of the size of things - I couldn't tell whether the buildings and streets I had printed out in order to locate the conference venue were huge buildings separated by wide streets, or small buildings separated by alleyways.

You may find the Google Earth view a bit more helpful if you go into the roads layer and turn on UK Roads.

IBM buys Gluecode - can they get buy-in for small J2EE?

Reading Service-Oriented Architecture blog today, found these interesting comments:

A completely proprietary SOA solution would work - as long as the INTERFACES are standard."

I agree.

However, an SOA running on a commodity open-source environment — built with open-source toolsets — is an incredible value proposition, far more than an SOA built on Websphere, WebLogic, or Microsoft BizTalk and .NET. These app servers have steep licensing costs, and companies looking for low-end platforms to build their services can turn to open-source app servers such as JBoss and Apache Geronimo.

Now, IBM steps into the scene with Gluecode under its wing, which leverages Apache Geronimo. ...

IBM intends to position Gluecode at the low end of the market, and keep WebSphere at the high end, where it's been strongest

You can get more info in the official IBM Press Release.
Forbes has some reporting on the open-source marketplace in general, in a category they have interestingly called Intelligent Infrastructure.

presentations from 26th Annual IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries) conference 2005 online

Presentations are linked from the Programme.

A few notable ones:

* Building Scholarly Information Infrastructure through Partnership

Achievement of the innovation agendas and eResearch initiatives which are being promoted in many countries, as well as the aspirations of the Millennium Declaration and the World Summit on the Information Society, depends on high quality scholarly information infrastructure

Alex Byrne, University Librarian, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

* A Researcher's Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication in Canada
Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries

* Reclaiming The Third Place: Libraries and their Communities in the Age of "Amazoogle."
Alane Wilson, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, USA

* Tapping the Global Information Base to Build an Innovative Knowledge Society

Access to and dissemination of scientific research data is fundamental to the advancement of science and researchers need rapid, unfettered use of data to remain at the cutting edge of research. However, rapid changes in the information infrastructure including e-publishing, digital content, on-line reference and searching provide both opportunities and challenges for policy makers and the technical library community. These and other issues will be the subject of this presentation.

Dr. Arthur J. Carty, National Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, Ottawa, Canada

* R&D @ Laval University Library -- Archimede and ETD's

Two of the three components of Université Laval library institutional repository will be briefly presented. The first one is called "Archimede", and includes a very effcient search engine called Lius. The second componenet is our ETD program.

Guy Teasdale, Directeur des services de développement et de support, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

* Institutional Repositories and Desktop Silos

XML-fuelled systems offer the opportunity to blur the lines between desktop computing and global collaboration in ways that could radically change the knowledge cycle. The long term success of Open Access and Institutional Repositories could be further assured by making it possible to publish and web-enable information much closer to the applications where it currently often lives.

Art Rhyno, Systems Librarian, University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada

CivicSpace community collaboration platform

CivicSpace is a free open-source software platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity. It allows individuals and organizations to build online communities that communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations and communities.

It is Drupal-based.

    So this stuff is open-source right?

    Yes. It is all gpl'ed. And even better it is built on top of Drupal, a thriving open-source
    web-application.  

teiPublisher XML repository

teiPublisher was developed to bridge the gap between having a collection of structured documents that are posted on the Web as static HTML or XML pages, and having a functional digital repository. This is being done by providing the tools to manage an XML-based repository which will make available, search, and browse documents encoded according to any XML DTD.

teiPublisher was designed to provide the administrative tools to help repository administrators with limited technical knowledge manage their digital collections. Building on Lucene, an indexing tool, and the native XML database eXist, the application provides a range of administrative functions crucial to maintaining a web-assessable digital repository.

For more information about teiPublisher, as well as download instructions, please visit our website teipublisher.sf.net

from Library Technology Guides

Google Code site

code.google.com
Google's place for Open Source software

via Bibliotheke

reSearcher library tools - more info

I've mentioned the reSearcher suite of tools before.

via Do-It-Yourself Ask GODOT: Open Source Link Resolver I discover that SFU has a development wiki that supports the reSearcher projects.

Web Services on Wall Street 2005

Web Services on Wall Street was February 1-2, 2005.

You can view various presentations (PowerPoint).

via Slashdot Open Source Message Queueing System /.

John Davies has announced AMQ, an effort at JPMorgan Chase & Co. to create an open-source message queuing system that can compete with proprietary message systems like IBM MQSeries and Tibco/RV.

UofT project on open access

The University of Toronto has launched Project Open Source | Open Access, "a cross-divisional, tri-campus initiative to develop a networked community to share knowledge, enhance coordination, increase awareness, and to encourage research and knowledge mobilisation in this area." Part of the project is a lecture series on OS and OA topics.  (Thanks to Leslie Chan.)

from Open Access News

I hope they won't mind too much if to promote their initiative, I rip out the info on their lecture series:

Feb. 10: Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa and author of the Toronto’s Star’s weekly column Law Bytes

Feb. 24: PANEL:Taking Software Open Source: Three Views
Jutta Treviranus, Director RCAT/KMDI, Ron Baecker, Professor Computer Science/KMDI & Claus Rinner, Assistant Professor, Geography

Mar. 10: Trebor Scholz, Institute for Distributed Creativity, SUNY, Buffalo

Mar. 17: Marcus Bornfreund, Director, Creative Commons.ca, Professor & Manager of the University of Ottawa Law & Technology Program

Mar. 31: John Willinsky, Principal Investigator of the Public Knowledge Project: & Professor, Faculty of Education, UBC

TBA: Steven Weber, author of The Success of Open Source & Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Lectures will be held from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, BA 1200 (1st floor) 40 St. George St.

The series will be webcast live and archived using ePresence Interactive Media.
Visit ePresence.kmdi.utoronto.ca for further details.

More events are planned. For the latest information see kmdi.utoronto.ca

reSearcher - open source academic library tools

reSearcher is an award-winning integrated suite of open source tools for locating and managing electronic information resources, designed for use by students and researchers in academic libraries. The four main modules of reSearcher are:

• GODOT, a full-text link resolver and interlibrary holdings locator and requesting system
• CUFTS, a full-text link resolver, knowledgebase, and electronic collection management tool
• Citation Manager, a tool for capturing, managing and exporting bibliographic data in a wide range of formats
• dbWiz, a cross-database search tool

Amazon DevCon

Amazon DevCon had an amazing line-up of speakers.  Fortunately AWS Blog was there to report on their presentations.

• Brian Aker 1 - Director of Architecture at MySQL
• Rael Dornfest - blogging software bloxsom
• George Dyson - beginnings of computing
• Bjorn Freeman-Benson 1 - intro to Eclipse
• James Gosling - Father of Java, Sun Microsystems
• Chris Hofmann 1 - "Amazon Involvement with Mozilla and Open Source Projects"
• Greg Kiczales - professor at the Software Practices Lab at the University of British Columbia
• Gavin King 1 - leads Hibernate project at JBoss
• Craig McClanahan - Struts and JavaServer Faces, Sun Microsystems
• Eric Neustadter - talks about Halo 2
• Margo Seltzer - CTO of SleepyCat software, Berkeley DB
• Guido van Rossum 1, 2 - creator of the Python programming language
• Joel Spolsky - of Joel On Software fame, Author of 2 books, former Microsoft employee, and founder of Fog Creek Software.
• Michael Tiemann - wrote the first native code C++ compiler, now works for RedHat

based on list from Pete Freitag.
Also see non-alphabetical list at Amazon DevCon - Speaker Index.
The Amazon Web Services Blog should learn about tagging related conference postings with the same tag.

SFU and UBC partner on open source publishing and harvesting

January 20, 2005

The University of British Columbia's Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Simon Fraser University Library and SFU's Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing (CCSP) have formed a partnership to support the maintenance and ongoing development of the internationally acclaimed open source software developed by PKP.

...

At the heart of the partnership are three major software programs. Open Journal Systems (OJS) provides online management for journal submissions, peer reviewing, editing, and online publishing and indexing. Open Conference Systems (OCS) manages conference registration, programming and paper submission and publication. The PKP Harvester (PKPH) is used to automatically create an online index of materials from a variety of online sites including journals and repositories such as those housed at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which are harvested and reside on an SFU Library server.

from New partnership supports open source publishing software development
via Open Access News

SciX, SOPS open source OA repository, ELPUB conference

SciX is an EU project on scientific information sharing.

In the SciX project we believe that the commercial publishers that take the copyright to scientific work have become and obstacle to an efficient scientific information exchange. The SciX project will, through business process engineering techniques, examine the current and invent new business models, demonstrate that alternative models are technically and economically viable and study the obstacles to the change.

They have produced software, SciX Open Publishing Services (SOPS).

SOPS provides building blocks, such as repository, user management,           discussions, ratings, reviews, review process support etc. out of which the above publications can be built.      

SOPS is open in the sense that it provides:

• WSDL definitions of all available functions,
• Metadata harvesting according to the OAI-PMH 2.0 standard.
• Compatibility with citation management software such as Reference Manager, Citation Manager and Endnote.
• Compatibility with Microsoft Office 2003 Research Task Pane
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.

SOPS is multilingual. It exists in English, German and Slovenian languages.

SOPS is being used to run the ELPUB Digital Library from SciX.

Info via BiblioAcid

Et une nouvelle source d'info en LIS/SIB : ELPUB Digital repository propose le texte intégral d'une bonne partie des interventions lors des conférences ELPUB - Electronic Publishing qui ont eu lieu depuis 1997. Quelques thèmes en vrac : LOCKSS, les métadonnées, XML... il y en a pour tous les goûts (près de 300 documents). La conférence 2005 aura lieu à Louvain

As indicated, the next conference is the ICCC 9th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB 2005) which will take place June 8-10, 2005 in Leuven, Belgium.

ELPUB 2004 was in Brazil.

The umbrella organization is the International Council for Computer Communication.

open source ILL

I am no expert on Interlibrary Loan (ILL) systems.  As far as I understand, they are used in a big way by my library for getting and sending orders, including delivering the documents electronically.

Infotrieve Ariel is a key system, however it is closed, proprietary, and commercial.

Loomware has lots of info about the issues with Ariel and a possible way forward: Freeing ILL Systems with EDEN.

book: open source for digital libraries

A week before Christmas I stumbled into a librarian weblog that I had never seen before. LibraryCog by Art Rhyno is a great weblog that talks about some of the more highly technical aspects of librarianship (a recent post was on regular expressions). In discovering this blog, I also discovered a wonderful book called Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries.

from Library Web Chic.
The book DOI is dx.doi.org/10.1336/159158065X

Searching on this book led me to a blog discovery of my own: The Ten Thousand Year Blog, with lots of groovy Canadian library info.

Cornell digital publishing system

DPubS [Digital Publishing System] will be enhanced and released as a general-purpose publishing platform for scholarly literature in diverse fields. It will support peer review, have extensive administrative functionality, and will provide interoperability with open source repository systems such as Fedora™ and DSpace™.

from dpubs.org

Open Access News says

DPubS was designed specifically to organize, navigate, access, and deliver both open access and subscription controlled scholarly publications.

DPubS is open source software.