Open Source

Two weeks ago, we officially announced the initial release of Krikri, our new metadata aggregation, mapping, and enrichment toolkit.

In light of its importance, we would like to take a moment for a more informal introduction to the newest members of DPLA’s herd. Krikri and Heiðrún (a.k.a. Heidrun; pronounced like hey-droon) are key to many of DPLA’s plans and serve as a critical piece of infrastructure for DPLA.

They are also names for, or types, of goats.

This post has been crossposted to the Digital Library Federation blog.

Code4lib 2015 was held last week from February 9-12, 2015 in Portland, Oregon. The Code4lib conferences have grown in the last ten years, both in terms of size and scope of topics. This growth is particularly impressive when you consider that much of the work of organizing the conference falls upon a circulating group of volunteers, with additional organizational support from organizations like the Digital Library Federation. It has become clear to me that the Code4lib community is interested in ensuring that it can develop and support compelling and useful conferences for everyone who chooses to participate.

As you probably know, DPLA is committed to making cultural heritage materials held in America's libraries, archives, and museums freely available to all, and we provide maximally open data to encourage transformative uses of those materials by developers. In addition, DPLA is also proud to distribute the software we produce to support our mission to the wider community.

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, has responded to the leaked SirsiDynix report that spreads horrific untruths about open source. Marshall Breeding posted Lynch's response on GuidePosts. In particular, Lynch notes the following:

I don't think that I ever wrote those words down in an article; I suppose I may have said something to that effect in an interview or q&a in some conference program like ALA Top Tech, though perhaps no quite as strongly as it's expressed here. I have without question spoken out about my concerns regarding investment in open source ILS development in the last few years. IF I did say this, it feels like it's used a little out of context -- or maybe the better characterization is over-simplistically -- in the report.

...

I think there are still major problems -- many of which we really don't know how to solve effectively, and which call for sustained and extensive research and development -- in various areas where ILS get involved in information discovery and the support of research and teaching. While I'm not opposed to seeing an open source ILS -- who could be? -- and recognize that it could be very useful, particularly as a platform for research and future innovation, open source re-implementation of current ILS functionality will not be a panacea for these still-unsolved challenges.

Thanks to Twitter, I discovered that Wikileaks has posted a report written by SirsiDynix Vice President for Innovation Stephen Abram which spreads a fantastic amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt about both open source software in general and, more specifically, the suitability of open source integrated library systems. As the summary provided by Wikileaks states,

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 ...

The source states that the document should be leaked so that everyone can see to what extent SirsiDynix will attempt to spread falsehoods and smear open source and the proponents of open source.

In addition, as you may have heard, the Queens Library is suing SirsiDynix for breach of contract; for what it's worth, the initial conference is scheduled for next Monday, November 2, 2009. More information on the lawsuit can be found on Justia.

I'd like to humbly announce that I've written a pre-pre-alpha Python module for working with the WorldCat Search API and the xID APIs. The code needs a fair amount of work, namely unit tests and documentation. I've released the code under the GPL.

The module, called "worldcat", is available from the Python Package Index. You can also checkout a copy of the code from my Subversion repository.