Category: Open Source Software

CDL Releases Self-Guided Tutorial for the eXtensible Text Framework

The California Digital Library has released a self-guided tutorial for its eXtensible Text Framework (XTF).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

XTF is an open source, highly customizable piece of software supporting the search, browse, and display of heterogeneous digital content and offering efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user interfaces for distinct digital collections. The tutorial provides guidance for implementing and customizing XTF, from core functionality to overall look and feel. . . .

The tutorial comes with a complete XTF package that is ready to run when uncompressed; no other installation is required. It contains nine modules spanning the most powerful and popular features, including how to:

  • Add new content
  • Change metadata
  • Change logo and colors
  • Increase significance of titles in ranking hits
  • Customize and enable default status of advanced search
  • Change fields displayed in search results
  • Enable structural searching
  • Create a hierarchical facet
  • Change footnote behavior

eXtensible Catalog Webcast Released

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project has released a six-part webcast that describes the software, which is expected to be released by the end of the month.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page that describes it:

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project is working to design and develop a set of open-source applications that will provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to library users. XC will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards, and will enable library content to be revealed through other services that libraries may already be using, such as content management systems and learning management systems. XC will also make library collections more web-accessible by revealing them through web search engines.

University of Rochester Releases New Institutional Repository System, IR Plus

The University of Rochester has released version alpha 0.1 of its new open source institutional repository system, IR Plus. A test version of the system is available, and a discussion group has been established on Google.

Here are the documentation links:

Now Available: Scriblio 2.7, CMS/OPAC WordPress Plugin

Scriblio 2.7 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from "Scriblio 2.7 Released":

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses. . . Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections.

Now Available: Zotero 1.5 Beta

The Center for History and New Media has released Zotero 1.5 Beta.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Zotero 1.5 Features

  • Automatic synchronization of collections across multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
  • Free automatic backup of your library data at Zotero.org.
  • Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a server of your choice (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).
  • Recover recently deleted items with Zotero’s trash can.
  • Rich-text notes
  • New style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats
  • Automatic detection of PDF metadata (author, title, etc.)
  • Automatic detection and support for proxy servers

Public Knowledge Releases Open Archives Harvester 2.3.0

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Archives Harvester, an open source OAI-PMH harvester.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).

Indiana University Releases Variations Digital Music Library System as Open Source Software

Indiana University has released Variations, a Java-based client-server software used to create digital music library systems, as open source software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Variations enables institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights.

A key feature of the system for faculty and students is the ability to create bookmarks and playlists for use in studying or in preparing classroom presentations, allowing easy access later on to specific audio time points or segments. A key feature for libraries is a flexible access control and authentication system, which allows libraries to set up access rules based on their own local institutional policies.

This software is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of development and use of digital music library systems at Indiana University. Creation of the current Variations software platform was originally funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded Indiana University a National Leadership Grant to extend this highly successful system to the nationwide library community. Beyond IU, the software is currently being used at the Ohio State University, University of Maryland, New England Conservatory of Music, and the Philadelphia area Tri-College Consortium (Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr).

This open source release of Variations complements IU's earlier release of the open source Variations Audio Timeliner, which lets users identify relationships in passages of music, annotate their findings, and play back the results with simple point-and-click navigation. This tool is also included as a feature of the complete Variations system. . . .

The Indiana University Digital Library Program and Cook Music Library created Variations in collaboration with faculty and students in IU's Jacobs School of Music. The IU Digital Library Program is a collaborative effort of the Indiana University Libraries and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

Archival Management Software: A Report for the Council on Library and Information Resources

The Council on Library and Information Resources has published Archival Management Software: A Report for the Council on Library and Information Resources by Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University.

Here's an excerpt from the report's Web page:

With generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources has launched a multiyear program that addresses the challenge of cataloging hidden collections—those materials held in special collections, archives, and other restricted or relatively inaccessible settings. The program has two major dimensions: first, to identify hidden collections of potential value to scholars; and second, to address the thorny issue of cataloging such materials efficiently, effectively, and in such a way that the catalog records are available to scholars through the Web. In this paper, Lisa Spiro describes and analyzes some of the major technologies that are available to librarians, curators, and archivists and the implications of deploying these systems for existing workflows.

New Press to Publish Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

The New Press will publish David Bollier's Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Reporting from the heart of this "free culture" movement, journalist and activist David Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, businesspeople, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation. Viral Spiral —the term Bollier coins to describe the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools—brilliantly interweaves the disparate strands of this eclectic movement. The story describes major technological developments and pivotal legal struggles, as well as fascinating profiles of hacker Richard Stallman, copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig, and other colorful figures.

Open Source Archival Software: ICA-AtoM 1.0.4 Beta Released

ICA-AtoM 1.0.4 beta has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the What is ICA-AtoM? page:

ICA-AtoM stands for International Council on Archives—Access to Memory. It is a web-based, open-source application for standards-based archival description in a multi-lingual, multi-repository environment.

ICA-AtoM comprises:

  • HTML pages served to a web browser from a web server. Apache is used in development but ICA-AtoM is also compatible with IIS.
  • A database on a database server. MySQL is used in development but ICA-AtoM uses a database abstraction layer and is therefore also compatible with Postgres, SQLite, SQLServer, Oracle, etc.
  • PHP5 software code that manages requests and responses between the web clients, the application logic and the application content stored in the database.
  • The Symfony web framework that organizes the component parts using object-orientation and best practice web design patterns.
  • The Qubit Open Information Management toolkit, developed by the ICA-AtoM project and customized to make the ICA-AtoM application.

CiteSeerX and SeerSuite: Havester + Search Engine + AI

In "CiteSeerX and SeerSuite—Adding to the Semantic Web," Avi Rappoport overviews beta versions of CiteSeerX and its open source, Java-based counterpart, SeerSuite.

Here's an excerpt:

Building on that experience, CiteSeerX is a completely new system, re-architected for scaling and modularity, to handle increasing demands from both researchers and digital library programmatic interfaces. The system uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, support vector machines, and other techniques to recognize and extract metadata for the articles found. It now uses the Lucene search engine and supports standards such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including metadata browsing, and Z39.50. CiteSeerX has a simple but powerful internal structure for documents and citations. If it cannot access a document cited, it creates a virtual document as a place holder, which can then be filled when the document is available.

Open Journal Systems SWORD Plugin

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released a SWORD plugin for Open Journal Systems, which was developed by Scott Yeadon and Leo Monus. The plugin requires "a significant amount of patching to DSpace," and it is recommended that testing be done with Fedora. A new version will be released next year that may eliminate the need for DSpace patching.

CHNM and Emory University Libraries Establish Zotero Software Development Partnership

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Emory University Libraries have announced the formation of a Zotero software development partnership.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A team of librarians, information technologists and faculty members led by Connie Moon Sehat, Emory Libraries' new director of digital scholarship initiatives, will extend research capabilities of the software in collaboration with Zotero's main development team. Sehat is a former co-director of Zotero and CHNM.

For Dan Cohen, who is associate professor of history at George Mason University and director of CHNM, a relationship with Emory exemplifies the powerful opportunities for institutional cooperation offered by digital media. "The Center for History and New Media and the Zotero Project are lucky to now have the resources and experience of Emory on their side," says Cohen, "and the continued insight and direction of Connie Sehat. We look forward to what will undoubtedly be a tremendously productive collaboration." Cohen oversees Zotero with Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason and CHNM's acting director of research projects.

This relationship marks a significant step forward for the future of the Zotero project. "Partnering on the development of open source software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative software," says Rick Luce, Emory University vice provost and director of libraries.

Already a powerful research tool, Zotero allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources such as citations, full texts, web pages, images and other objects. It meshes the functionality of older reference manager applications with modern software and web applications, such as del.icio.us and YouTube, to amass large amounts of data in easy ways.

Over the next two years, Zotero will allow researchers—and their data—to interact with one another in Web 2.0 communities, help scholars archive information with the Internet Archive and offer text-mining capabilities. Zotero also will expand educational offerings to provide more support for its growing national and international communities of users, many located in university settings. Working in conjunction with the Zotero team at CHNM, Emory's Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and library expertise to contribute to Zotero's anticipated growth.

Archivists' Toolkit Version 1.5 Released

The Archivists' Toolkit version 1.5 has been released.

See "New Features for AT Release 1.5" for details.

Here's an excerpt from the home page that describes the software:

The Archivists' Toolkit™, or the AT, is the first open source archival data management system to provide broad, integrated support for the management of archives. It is intended for a wide range of archival repositories. The main goals of the AT are to support archival processing and production of access instruments, promote data standardization, promote efficiency, and lower training costs.

Currently, the application supports accessioning and describing archival materials; establishing names and subjects associated with archival materials, including the names of donors; managing locations for the materials; and exporting EAD finding aids, MARCXML records, and METS, MODS and Dublin Core records. Future functionality will be built to support repository user/resource use information, appraisal for archival materials, expressing and managing rights information, and interoperability with user authentication systems.

Digital Collections/Exhibitions Software: Omeka 0.10b Released

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10b.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Omeka 0.10b incorporates many of the changes you asked for: an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema and fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability with digital repository software and collections management systems; elegant reworkings of our theme API and plugin API to make add-on development more intuitive and more powerful; a new, even more user friendly look for the administrative interface; and a new and improved Exhibit Builder. While the changes are extensive and represent a next-to-last step forward toward a 1.0 release in early 2009, existing users of Omeka should have little trouble switching to 0.10b. New users should have even less trouble getting started. Meanwhile, visitors to Omeka.org will find a new look, a more intuitive information architecture, easily browsable themes and plugins directories, improved documentation and user support, and new ways to get involved in the Omeka community.

Digital Collections/Exhibitions Software: Omeka Package from OKAPI Released

The Open Knowledge and the Public Interest has created an Omeka package that "bundles together their custom theme, plugin modifications and additions to the 0.9.2 version."

Here's an excerpt from the Omeka announcement:

The Okapi theme enables Omeka users without expert web design skills to create polished multimedia exhibits and collections. The home page features a cinematic 980×500 pixel main image and up to four featured exhibits. Exhibit pages include new layouts for articles, themed collections and embedded multimedia. The bundled Multimedia Links plugin enables embedding of HTML code, flash video (flv), and many other formats supported by the included JWplayer. The theme displays accessible Flash-based typography and is W3C CSS and XHTML compliant.

George Mason University Responds to Zotero Lawsuit

George Mason University has issued a statement regarding the Thomson Reuters Zotero lawsuit.

Here's an excerpt from the statement:

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: "The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating."

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged.

Read more about it at "Company's Lawsuit Over Free Scholarly Organization Tool Generates Buzz" and "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software."

U-SKIS: Open Source Institutional Repository Workflow Software for CONTENTdm

The University of Utah's Marriott Library has developed the open source University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) for institutional repository workflow control with the CONTENTdm software. U-SKIS is written in Perl 5.5 and utilizes MySQL.

Read more about it at "University of Utah's Open Source Software Extends Power of CONTENTdm for Institutional Repositories."

Omeka 0.10 Alpha Released

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10 Alpha. Omeka is used to provide access to digital collections and exhibitions (see the About page).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In this version we’ve updated to a powerful new data model based on an unqualified Dubin Core standard. We’ve also improved the theme and plugin APIs to work with that data model and make it easier for plugin and theme creators to work with Omeka.

OpenCollection Version 0.54-3 Released

OpenCollection version 0.54-3 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the Overview page:

OpenCollection is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, OpenCollection is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive.

See the Features page for more details about this open source software.

Switzerland: Test Your ISP's Net Neutrality

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released Switzerland, an open source software tool for testing your ISP's net neutrality.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Part of EFF's "Test your ISP" project, Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use.