digitizationblog

Art Rhyno presented on open source software. This was a broad overview which focused on the benefits of open source and also the general health of open source software in libraries. Although the whole hour was great -- for example, seeing actual photos of executives from major software companies frothing at the mouth while spreading fear uncertainty and doubt about open source always makes me smile -- the highlight for me was Art's story that expresses the essence of open source software. In the town where he grew up, mothers would circulate printed copies of recipes around to other households. The recipes would quickly accumulate annotations such as "I added some cinnamon and it tastes great" or "Now I know why Scott is always over at your place around supper time!" So it is with open source software: sharing fosters improvement.

The next session I attended was on ETD workflows, where several speakers described how their universities implemented electronic theses services. This session had a nice mix of social engineering and technology. A team from Uppsala University in Sweden demonstrated a workflow tool they are developing, which looks quite flexible and sophisticated. The initial intent for this tool is for managing ETD workflows but they pointed out that it could also be used for other applications involving editorial roles, such as journal publication.

On to the next day… Marcus Bornfreund, Co-Director of Creative Commons Canada, delivered the morning plenary session. He defined some basic copyright issues, moved on to licenses and then on to CC licenses by showing that excellent Building on the Past movie. My takeaway point from Marcus’ talk: It is much easier to change from a more restrictive license to a more generous license than vice versa. If you change the license on your work from less restrictive to more restrictive, you will get a lot of bad press because you are appearing to decrease the user’s ability to use your work. Therefore, if you are unsure about which CC license to distribute your work under, tend to the more restrictive.

Next was the panel I participated in, Metadata. I talked about the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ efforts to develop an application profile for Canadian Institutional Repositories. My copresenters were Yann Nicolas, who spoke about France’s standard for describing electronic theses (called TEF) and how it is being implemented, and Brian Surratt from Rice University, who spoke on the Texas Digital Library’s ETD metadata standard.

After lunch, I attended a panel presenting three different open source document repository management systems: Cyberdocs, Castore, and Archimède. Open source is clearly alive and thriving in the Francophonie.