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A couple of interesting stories regarding open source library projects have come out during the past few days.

First, Carl Grant, the former CEO of VTLS, is forming a new company devoted to providing and building services for open source software. The name of the company is CARe Affiliates, and they have already struck a deal with open source software provider Index Data (creators of Zebra, YAZ, YAZ Proxy, Metaproxy, Keystone, and so forth). I have worked just a bit with Carl and he seems to be a stand-up guy. Best of luck, Carl.

Second, the Mellon Foundation has approached the GPLS with great interest in the open source ILS, Evergreen. Where this is going is yet to be seen, but it's something to keep an eye on. It could be a fantastic opportunity for libraries that are frustrated with their current ILS and have the resources to commit development time. (With an assumption that the former set is vastly larger than the latter set.) This could be very exciting.

Those who still doubt that open source in libraries is a legitimate movement must find it more and more difficult to justify their arguments.

Matt Zumwalt of MediaShelf, LLC has been hard at work thinking about how to make Fedora RESTful. There is now a proposal on the Fedora wiki based on a PDF he sent to the fedora-commons-developers list.

It's an interesting proposal. I've read over the PDF version quickly but it does bear a closer read.

Whether SOAP or REST is more appropriate for a Fedora API is something I'm not sure about, though I don't mean to imply it's an either/or situation.

There is a series of blog posts that is now getting a lot of press in the biblioblogosphere. I won't link to it. I won't refer to it by name. And I will not name its author.

Goodness, why give the author the satisfaction of a response? It lends his or her points a certain credence that they would otherwise lack. This, my friends, is little more than the sound of irrelevance. It will pass in time.

At long last, the paper that Ron Jantz and I wrote for the Journal of Archival Organization has been published in a special double issue. It's titled "Digital Archiving and Preservation: Technologies and Processes for a Trusted Repository" and is intended to be a fairly nitty-gritty piece on digital preservation (in the context of trusted repositories) for archivists. The abstract:

This article examines what is implied by the term "trusted" in the phrase "trusted digital repositories." Digital repositories should be able to preserve electronic materials for periods at least comparable to existing preservation methods. Our collective lack of experience with preserving digital objects and consensus about the reliability of our technological infrastructure raises questions about how we should proceed with digital-based preservation practices, an emerging role for academic libraries and archival institutions. This article reviews issues relating to building a trusted digital repository, highlighting some of the issues raised and possible solutions proposed by the authors in their work of implementing and acculturating a digital repository at Rutgers University Libraries.

This special double-issue of JAO will also be released in the manuscript, "Archives and the Digital Library."

Thanks to editors Bill Landis, Robin Chandler, Tom Frusciano, and Caryn Radick for seeing this through. And of course to Ron Jantz for getting me interested in this crazy stuff at a time when I had no direction or interest in my career.

This is a slightly modified (read: rough) transcription of the talk I gave at this year's NJLA conference, called "Library Revolution." Continue reading…