Archive for September, 2008
The Grand Rapids Public Library went live on MIchigan Evergreen yesterday – see MLC’s News page and the Michigan Evergreen blog for details. There were the usual first-day hiccups, but today all seems to be running smoothly. Niles District Library is scheduled to go live on Michigan Evergreen next week.
This is a pretty exciting time for MLC in the world of open source technology. Michigan Evergreen, our shared open-source ILS, has kept us busy the past several weeks training the pilot libraries and working with Equinox and GRPL on the migrations. It has been a true challenge for us to work in a “no vendor” environment on this project, as it presents a new and different model for working with our member libraries. Open source is changing the way we think and the way we work – a whole new world!
This Friday, MLC’s Annual Meeting, “Open Source, Open Libraries,” will feature LC’s Daniel Chudnov and representatives from the Michigan library community talking about open source in libraries. We just learned that registrations for the Annual Meeting have sold out (although the system will accept “waiting list” registrations through tomorrow). Pretty cool to know that our members are as interested in open source as we are.
September 30th, 2008
In preparation for MLC’s special program “Open Source, Open Libraries,” we polled the lists a couple months ago asking for information on open source software currently in use in Michigan libraries. The list of the responses is now compiled on the Open Source page on the Michigan Libraries Wiki at: http://mlcnet.org/wiki/index.php/Open_Source Please feel free to add your library’s open source information to the list!
We have a great line-up for the “Open Source, Open Libraries” program, including keynote speaker Daniel Chudnov from the Library of Congress.
In addition to our keynote, members of the Michigan library community will highlight some of their favorite open source applications:
Terry Robertson and Steve Sowder, Andrews University, on Eprints, open source software for institutional repositories.
John Rucker, Branch District Library, on Dansguardian, open source filtering software
Mark Szidik, Michigan Library Consortium, on Mozilla Firefox and GiMP.
Bill Ott, Grand Rapids Public Library, on Open Office applications.
For further information and to register online, go to:
https://members.mlcnet.org/workshops/viewcourse.html?id=191
September 16th, 2008
As an extension of its digitization project begun in 2006 with the New York Times and the Washington Post, Google announced yesterday that a number of publishers will give Google access to their historical newspaper content. Notably, ProQuest will give Google access to content from among the 10,000+ newspaper titles in its vault. The microfilms will be scanned so users can see newspapers exactly as printed, and OCR software will extract the full text to make it searchable via the Google News Archive. According to Google’s Adam Smith, the new data will be ad-supported with no initial pay-per-view restrictions–unlike some existing News Archive content. ProQuest was careful to point out that its subscription services such as Historical Newspapers [available through MLC] will not be affected.
Additional information:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10035172-93.html
http://www.proquest.com/pressroom/pressrelease/08/20080908.shtml
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/bringing-history-online-one-newspaper.html
September 9th, 2008
