Main menu:

Site search

Feeds

Categories

July 2009
S M T W T F S
« May    
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

Archive

Blacklight 2.1 release

The 2.1 release is out the door and ready for download. You can download it here and view the release notes here.

Highlights of this release include:

  • Several bug fixes
  • More robust testing for the plugin (tests for the plugin no longer rely on an external solr index)
  • Better adherence to W3C accessibility guidelines
  • Savable search history
  • APA/MLA citations
  • OpenSearch support
  • Fielded search

Blacklight 2.0 release!

There is a spiffy new 2.0 release out in the world now, and you can download it here and release notes are here. This is our first release since refactoring for the plugin architecture, so we thought it deserved a major number bump. Also, we’ve re-arranged the subversion tree so current development is now happening in trunk. Docs on the wiki are updated accordingly. The rdocs from the Blacklight plugin are visible online now too, here. Please have a look and give us some feedback!

note: This is re-posted from the blacklightopac.org blog. I can’t believe this release is finally out the door. Actually, it has been for a couple of days, but I guess I was too tired to write any blog posts about it yesterday.

Welcome to librarianship, Joyce Chapman

I am pleased as punch that Joyce Chapman, who I have known since forever, and who has always impressed me as an intelligent and motivated person, has finished library school and is about to be one of the NCSU Library Fellows. Great choice of careers, Joyce. Great hire, NCSU!

Joyce Chapman will complete the Master of Science in Information Science from UNC-CH. While in graduate school, Chapman has worked on a variety of projects for the Southern Historical Collection. She is currently leading a project to redesign the online display of finding aids, oversee the migration of finding aids, and conduct usability studies. Working with both the Southern Historical Collection and Southern Oral History Program, she directed a migration project of the oral history collection into CONTENTdm. She is currently leading comparative mass digitization testing as a research assistant for the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, where she also encoded digital image metadata. She completed a field experience at the Minnesota Historical Society, where she directed a style sheet redesign project, assisted in migration of finding aids, and wrote best practice guidelines. Before attending graduate school, Chapman taught internationally in Japan and Nicaragua, and within the United States in New Orleans, Louisiana and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She earned the Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and German summa cum laude from UNC-CH, where she was awarded the UNC Chancellor’s Award in Germanic Languages and Literature, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Rima Kupryte, Dorothy Eneya, eIFL, and Ada Lovelace Day

To celebrate the first (hopefully annual?) Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to highlight the work of two remarkable women who work with an organization called Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), which exists to enable and sustain access to knowledge by library users in developing and transitional countries. The organization does this by helping member nations build sustainable national library consortia, negotiating with publishers of electronic journals and databases for affordable prices and fair terms for access, providing education about Intellectual Property and advocating for IP treaties that take the needs of developing nations into account, advocating for Open Access Publishing, and (near and dear to my heart) increasing the capacity of member nations to use and develop open source software.

Rima Kupryte is the director of eIFL. In 1995 she started working with the Open Society Institute’s Network Library Program, and in 2003 this group became an independent entity, with Rima at the helm. In 2008, Rima was awarded the IFLA Medal, one of the highest honors given in the field of librarianship. I can’t say this better than Hannie Sander did, so I’ll quote:

“eIFL is extremely fortunate to have had Rima at its helm”, said Hannie Sander, Chairperson of the eIFL.net Advisory Board. “Rima has worked with amazing energy to build eIFL up from a small project into a global network encompassing 50 countries and more than 4,400 libraries. Under her leadership, program areas have expanded from bulk licensing of e-resources and support for the development of sustainable library consortia, to advocacy and capacity building in open access and local institutional repositories, fair copyright laws and the benefits of open source solutions for library management systems. Her total commitment to levelling the playing field for librarians and their users in transition and developing countries has led eIFL to where it is today, a vibrant knowledge-sharing network with an impressive array of programs and capacity building events each year”.

Dorothy Eneya has been trying to reach similar goals, but on a more local level. She is the eIFL-FOSS country coordinator for the nation of Malawi. Dorothy is a systems librarian, which is a challenging job under the best of circumstances, but for the past several years her library has been facing a particular crisis: the commercial Integrated Library System that the University of Malawi started using in their first attempt at automation was unsupportably expensive. What do you do when your university library is already automated, to shut down the ILS would mean that the library could not function, and yet there is no money to pay the software license? They migrated to Koha, and you can read all about the adventure in a paper Dorothy wrote about the experience: A LONG WALK TO AUTOMATION: EXPERIENCES AND CHALLENGES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MALAWI LIBRARIES (which, ironically, I cannot find from an OA site, so hopefully your library has a subscription to one of the databases that have it).

You can hear some brief interviews with some eIFL folks in this podcast, btw. An interview with Dorothy starts at 58:33.

Rima and Dorothy are inspirational to me, and I just wanted to take a moment to applaud their work.

Ada Lovelace Day

I just heard about Ada Lovelace Day and I think it’s a super idea.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. [...] We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless. [...] It’s up to you how you interpret the phrase “in technology”. We’re not just interested in hardcore ninja programmers, but any woman who creates, invents, or uses any technology in an innovative way. Feel free to interpret it as widely as you like.

I have taken the pledge, and I hope lots of people in the open source and the library technology worlds participate. I can’t wait to read all of the profiles.