LIBR287-06: The Open Movement and Libraries Course Plan

Course Outline for LIBR287-06/LIBR287-15

LIBR287-06/LIBR287-15
Seminar in Information Science
The Open Movement and Libraries
Fall 2008

Ellyssa Kroski
IM: AIM ellyssakroski
ellyssakroski [at] yahoo.com
http://www.ellyssakroski.com

Course Syllabus
Course Website
Course Journal

The Open Movement and Libraries

"Openness" which has become a hallmark of the new Web has long been a mission in libraries. The philosophy of free and open access to information and technology has become a critical subject for information and technology leaders and practitioners. This course will explore the role and participation of library science and librarians in this movement. This course will give an overview of open-source technologies (such as content management systems and ILS programs) which are being used by libraries today, as well as exploring the open access movement which advocates free online access to scholarly research and journal articles. During the course we will also discuss open courses and learning, open conferences, and open licenses (like GPL and Creative Commons). This practical knowledge will be taught with an eye towards students understanding the implications of open access and what it means for libraries and librarians.

Course Outline

Open Source Software

OSS Week 1: Open Source Software Overview and Background

Readings

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond, 25 pages)
Open Source Definition (Open Source Initiative, 1 page)
Open Source Software in Education (Lakhan and Jhunjhunwala, 7 pages)
Making a Business Case for Open Source ILS (Breeding, 3 pages)
Open Source and Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science (Cana, 1 page)
Open Minds, Open Books, Open Source (Guess, 2 pages)

Resources

· The Open Source Initiative

· OSSWatch

Assignments

Blog the answers to two of these questions:

What are some of the drivers of library adoption of OSS?
What are some of the parallels between the OSS movement and mission of libraries?
How might the library field benefit from bazaar-style development?

OSS Week 2: Open Source Software Examples

Guest Speaker Podcast Interview with TBA

Resources: Finding Open Source Software

Operating Systems

Linux

Web Servers

Apache - most popular Web server in the world.

Learning Management Systems (Similar to Blackboard)

Content Management Systems/Community Building Software

Drupal - This is the technology our class website is built with
Joomla
Plone

Blogging Platforms

Wikis

MediaWiki

Podcasting

Office Suites

OpenOffice (Windows)
NeoOffice (Mac)

Web Browsers

Firefox

Media Players

Songbird

Email

Thunderbird

Image Editing

GIMP

Assignments

Download and install either OpenOffice or NeoOffice on your computer.
Blog your impressions comparing this OSS program to commercial products you've used. Would this experience make you more or less likely to try other OSS applications?

OSS Week 3: Library Open Source Software

An Interview with Nicole Engard
Open Source Evangelist for LibLime

nicole_interview.mp3

Nicole received her MLIS from Drexel University in 2007. Having worked in libraries for over 7 years, she has recently accepted the position of Open Source Evangelist at LibLime (http://liblime.com). Starting in web development and moving on to working with metadata and cataloging, she has had the opportunity to work with people in all areas of the library and can be found at conferences around the world presenting on open source and web 2.0 topics. Nicole is best known for her blog, What I Learned Today... where she writes about technology issues for libraries, and her work in developing a 2.0 friendly intranet at Jenkins Law Library in Philadelphia. In 2007 she was named one of Library Journal's Movers & Shakers and has published several articles on technology and libraries.

Readings

Open Source for Libraries Presentation (Breeding, 63 slides)
Open Source Software for Libraries LTR (Bisson, West, and Eby, 53 pages)
Free for All: Open Source Software (Schneider, 3 pages)
Ten Years of Learned Helplessness Coming to an End (Ayre, 1 page)

Integrated Library Systems (ILS)

Koha

LibLime - recently acquired Koha's two original developers
Next-gen catalog

RSS
Relevance ranking
Supports enriched content
Limit to available
Faceted navigation

In use by over 350 libraries
Demo

Evergreen

Next-gen catalog

Relevance ranking of subjects, , authors, series, etc.
Format icons
Enriched content
Browse Shelves

In use by 44 library systems & over 250 locations:
Demo

OPALS

Developed by Media Flex
In use by 40+ school libaries
Demo

OPACs

Scriblio

Previously WPopac
OPAC based on WordPress open-source blogging platform
Created by Plymouth State University
Next-Gen Catalog

Tagged browsing
Faceted Search
RSS

Demo

VuFind

Created by Villanova University
Runs on Solr Energy. Apache Solr, an open source search engine.
Next-Gen Catalog

Social Features
Favorite Lists
Faceted Search
"More like this" Recommendations
Compatible with Zotero

Demo

Extensible Catalog

Created by The University of Rochester River Campus Libraries
In development with funding from Mellon

Fac-Back-OPAC

Uses Solr & Django
Faceted search results

Digital Repository Software (OSS used by both OA & OER)

DSpace

Software program for digital asset management
Originally developed by Hewlett Packard & MIT
Most often used for Institutional Repositories (IR)
Available under a BSD license
Over 300 installations in 54 countries
Demo

FEDORA

Framework for building repository systems
Not an out-of-the-box solution
Many front-end interfaces available for download
Created by Cornell University Information Science & University of Virginia Library
APIs
127 installations
Demo

EPrints

aka GNU EPrints
The first OS IR software
Developed at the University of Southampton in the UK
268 known archives running the software
Demo

Federated Searching

LibraryFind

Metasearch application creatd by Oregon State University Libraries
Searches multiple databases using Z39.50
Built in OpenURL resolver
Demo

dbWiz

Federated search utility
Created by Simon Fraser University
Demo

Misc.

Libx

A framework for creating custom library Firefox extensions
Read more here.

OCLC Open Source Projects

Licensed under their OCLC Research Public License 2.0

Groovix

Public Access computing

The Reference Portal

Open-source departmental intranet which aggregates Web resources & tools for reference librarians

Commercial Support Services for open source library software

Care Affiliates

Founded in 2007
Acquired by LibLime, Aug 2008

Index Data

Founded in 1994
Provide OSSto libraries and support services

LibLime

Founded in 2005
Acquired original Koha developers
Provides support services to libraries for Koha

Equinox Software

Founded in 2007 by Evergreen developers
Provides support services to libraries for Evergreen

Assignments

Demo some of the library programs
Blog the answers to two of these questions:

Are OSS ILS systems and OPACs simply replacements for proprietary ones or are they improvements?
What are some of the downsides of implementing OSS in libraries?
It seems that many OSS library implementations will end up costing nearly as much as a commercial system, what then is the point of choosing OSS?
Is there a danger with OSS of trading issues of vendor lock-in for a new dependance on commercial support services? If yes, how might this be avoided?

OR
Record a short demo using Elluminate of one of the above programs pointing out key features.

OSS Week 4: Open Source Software Licensing & Sustainability

Readings

Some Economic & Legal Aspects of Open Source Software (Frost, 44 pages)
Open Source and Sustainability (OSI, 2 pages)
Crossing the Chasm: Open Source Software Comes of Age (OSS Watch, 11 pages)
From Open Source to Long-Term Sustainability: Review of Business Models and Case Studies (Chang, Mills, and Newhouse, 8 pages)
GNU General Public License (Various, pages)
BSD Licenses (Various, pages)

Resources

OSI: Open Source Licenses List

Assignments

Blog the answers to one of the following questions:

Which model of sustainability makes the most sense to you and why?
If you were a software developer, which license would you assign to your creations and why?
In what ways does OSS spur innovation?

Open Education

OER Week 1: Open Educational Resources Overview and Background

Readings

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (Chapters 1-4, OECD, 70 pages)
Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (Chapter 7, OECD, 10 pages)
Testimony to the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education (Wiley, 7 pages)

Assignments

Blog the answers to two of these questions:

What are some of the drivers to the Open Education movement?
What role can libraries and librarians play in Open Education?
Why would insititutions and/or individuals want to share their educational materials in this way?
Why would individual faculty members want to give away their course materials?

OER Week 2: Open Educational Resources Initiatives

Readings

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (pages 1-33, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond)

Open Portals and Gateways

OER Repositories

OER Initiatives & OCW

Library-Related OER

Library Instruction Wiki
Harvard Open Collections Program
PRIMO: Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online Database by ACRL
ANTS: animated library tutorials

Finding OER

Assignments

Browse some of the OER initiatives
Blog the anwer to one of these questions:

Which of these OER intiatives would you consider recommending to motivated self-learners and why?
What types of library-related OER initiatives could you create to be beneficial to the field or to patrons?
What unique skills would librarians bring to the Open Education Movement which might add value to the organization, management, preservation, or indexing of OER?

OER Week 3: Sustainability, Challenges, and Economic Models of Open Education

An Interview with Stephen Downes
Senior Researcher at the National Research Council, Canada.

sdownes_interview.mp3

Stephen Downes is a Senior Researcher for the National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. Stephen is a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata, weblogs in education, content syndication, digital rights and related issues. He is best known for his daily research newsletter, OLDaily (short for Online Learning Daily), which reaches thousands of readers across Canada and around the world. His work also includes the development of educational content syndication systems such as Edu_RSS and DLORN along and the design of a digital rights management system for learning resources. To find out more about Stephen visit his website.

Readings

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (Chapter 6 OECD, 10 pages)
Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges (Hylen, 10 pages)
Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources (Koohang and Harman, 10 pages)
On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education (Wiley, 20 pages)
Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources (Downes, 16 pages)

Assignments

Blog the answers to two of these questions:

What economic model(s) of sustainability make the most sense to you and why?
Is there a different model of sustainability that you think might work?
Do you think OER initiatives are sustainable? Why or why not?
What can we learn from Web 2.0 initiatives, new Web models of decentralization and participatory, user/producer culture in thinking about the future of Open Education?

Copyright & Open Licenses

Copyright & Open Licenses Week 1: Introduction to Copyright & the Public Domain

Readings

Copyright Basics (Carroll, 9 pages)
Public domain (Various, 10 pages)
An Interview with Lawrence Lessig on Copyrights (Lessig, 5 pages)
Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig lecture

Resources

Bound by Law Comic Book

Assignments

No questions this week, next week's questions will build on these readings

Copyright & Open Licenses Week 2: Open Licenses

An Interview with Jimmy Wales
Founder and President of the Wikimedia Foundation.

jwales_interview.mp3

The founder and President of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation which operates Wikipedia. He has also founded several other wiki projects including the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. . Wales is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Creative Commons. He has just launched a new open source initiative called Wikia Search. To find out more about Jimmy, visit his blog.

Readings

Creative Commons (Watch videos)
Creative Commons for Librarians Presentation (Kleinman, 25 slides)
GNU Free Documentation License (FSF, 6 pages)
Free content tutorial (Various, 12 pages)
Open educational resources and practices (Blackall, 8 pages)
Noncommercial isn’t the problem, ShareAlike is (Wiley, 5 pages, also read the comments)
ShareAlike, the public domain, and privileging (Wiley, 3 pages, also read the comments)
Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License (Möller, 9 pages)
Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (Chapter 5 OECD, 16 pages)

Assignments

Blog the answers to two of these questions:

How much of the public domain's value of enabling people to build on the works of others is realized when works are licensed with these new open licenses?
Now that you've read about these open licenses, which one, if any, would you choose to license your next creative work and why?
How do you think OER should be licensed? Should there be a standard license for all OER, or not and why?
If you could create a new CC license or amend GFDL in a way that would benefit OER, how would you do it?
Why do you think it might be useful for librarians, especially those in an academic settin, to be knowledgable about open license options?

Open Access

OA Week 1: Open Access Overview and Background

Readings

Open Access Overview (Suber, 10 pages)
Open Access Basics (Crawford, 3 pages)
Access - Chapter 4 in The Access Principle (Willinsky, 25 pages)
Open Access Initiative: A New Paradigm for Scholarly Communications (Yiotis, 5 pages)
Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness (Van orsdel & Born, 6 pages)
Thinking About Libraries and Access (Crawford, 5 pages)
Framing the Issue: Open Access (ARL, 10 pages)
Open Access Myths (Crawford, 8 pages)

Major Open Access Statements

Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002)
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003)
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the (October 2003)
IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research (2004)

Resources

Assignments

Blog the answers to two of these questions

What stake to libraries have in the open access movement?
How is the Open Access movement beneficial or detrimental to libraries, to publishers, and to readers?
What role can libraries and librarians play in the Open Access movement?
Why is the Open Access movement becoming popular now?

OA Week 2: Green OA: Self Archiving & Repositories

An Interview with Dorothea Salo
Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin

dsalo_interview.mp3

Dorothea Salo is responsible for MINDS@UW , which is the institutional repository for the University of Wisconsin System, consisting of 13 four-year universities, 13 two-year colleges, and the statewide UW Extension. She holds a master's degree in Library and Information Studies and another in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a BA in comparative literature and Spanish from Indiana University at Bloomington. To find out more about Dorothea, visit her blog Caveat Lector.

Readings

Repositories: What they are, and what we use them for - (Ockerbloom, 1 1/2 pages)
Repositories 101 - Part 1 (Godfrey, 2 pages)
Repositories 101 - Part 2 (Godfrey, 3 1/2 pages)
Innkeeper at the Roach Motel (Salo, 27 pages)
Open Access: Online Archives (Barlow, 3 pages)
SPARC Author Rights Brochure (SPARC, 8 pages)
SPARC Author Addendum [ PDF HTML DOC ]

Resources

Institutional Repositories

Disciplinary Repositories

E-LIS: the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies
DList (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology)
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
arXiv
PubMedCentral
Minority Health Archive at University of Pittsburgh
PhilSci Archive at University of Pittsburgh
Find many more through OpenDOAR

Assignments

Look up a journal you would like to write for in SHERPA/RoMEO and read their policy on self-archiving.
Search OAIster for a subject you are researching & view the results
Browse repositories
Self-Archive the pre-print of your final paper in either ELIS or DList

OA Week 3: Gold OA: Open Access Journals

Readings

Open Access Controversies (Crawford, 9 pages)

Elluminate Session: How to Use the Open Journals System/Basic Setup of Class Journal and Editorial Policies

Resources

Open Access Journals

Assignments

Browse the OA journals in the library field as well as others.
Create an account as an author in the class OA journal and submit your final paper.
I will assign you a role as a peer reviewer for the journal as well and you will each be assigned 2 papers to review.
Review the papers you have received and submit your reviews by the end of the week.

OA Week 4: Open Access Policy & Business Models

An Interview with Peter Suber
Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College

psuber_interview.mp3

Peter Suber is a Senior Researcher at SPARC, Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project of Yale Law School, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and author of the Open Access News blog and SPARC Open Access Newsletter. He is also a leading voice in the Open Access Movement.

Readings

Business Models in Open Access Publishing: Chapter 11 in Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects (Cockerill, 6 pages)
OA Journal Business Models (OAD, 6 pages)
Ten Flavors of Open Access - Appendix A in The Access Principle (Willinsky, 6 pages)

Major Open Access Policy Mandates

Stanford University School of Education Open Access Motion
NIH Public Access Policy
Harvard Arts & Sciences Faculty Open Access Mandate (first university mandate in the US/first anywhere to be initiated by faculty)
Harvard Law School open access motion
ERC Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access
Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
Howard Hughes Medical Institute BioMed Central Open Access Publishing Agreement
Wellcome Trust

Resources

Assignments

Blog the answer to one of these questions:

What impact do you think these mandates will have on scholarly communication?
Does OA undermine the traditional publishing system?
How does OA publishing affect libraries' ability to maintain long-term access to collections?

Review the comments you have received from your peer reviewers, and start editing your paper.

Thanksgiving Week

Assignments

Finish editing your paper and upload the final copy to the journal.

Open Everything Trend

Open Everything Week 1: Open Textbooks and Unconferences

Open Textbooks

Readings

Online 'open textbooks' save students cash (Shkolnikova, 2 pages)
First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry (Stross, 2 pages)
All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books (Crowell, 10 pages)

Open Source Books

Unconferences

An Interview with Stephen Francoeur
Information Services Librarian at Baruch College

sfrancoeur_interview.mp3

Stephen Francoeur is an Information Services Librarian at Baruch College, and was one of the organizers of the LibraryCampNYC unconference in 2007. To find out more about him, visit his Digital Reference blog.

Readings

Unconference Wikipedia entry (Various, 1 page)
What is an unconference? (Winer, 2 pages)
Understanding the Unconference (Follett, 2 pages)

Resources

BarCamp

Library Unconferences

Library camp 2008 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Library Camp Kansas (KS)
Library camp 2006 (Ann Arbor, MI)
Library camp East 2006 (Darien, CT)
Library camp NYC (Baruch College, NYC)
L2 unconference Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia)
Libcamp Boston (Boston, MA)
FLA/PLAN Unconference (Niceville, FL)
Library2.0 on the loose (Perth, Australia)
slq Library 2.0 Unconference (Brisbane, Australia)
Read between the lines (Lansing, MI)
Library camp @ Syracuse (Syracuse, NY)

Assignments

Blog the answers to one of these questions

What advantages do you think unconferences might bring to the library field?
What incentives might authors have to make their textbooks open?

Open Everything Week 2: New Web Initiatives and Wrap-up

Class Open Access Journal Published

Open Web Trends

Readings

API (Various, 1 page)

Open API (Various, 1 page)

Resources

MySpace's Data Availability Project

Enables the ability to keep and update one user profile for use within many social communities.
Members

Twitter
eBay
PhotoBucket
Yahoo!
Eventful
Flixter

Facebook Connect

Enables members to share their data, friends lists, and content with other websites.
Members

Digg
CitySearch

OpenID

A shared identity service, which enables Web users to sign into many different websites with a single sign on eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.
An open standard

Data Portability

An initiative with a mission it is to facilitate interoperability between social networks enabling members to access friends and media between all of the social communities to which they belong.
Video
Members

MySpace
Facebook
Yahoo!

Facebook Developers Platform

The Facebook API which enabled third-party developers to create applications for use within the Facebook community.

Google's Open Social

A common set of APIs which can be used to build third-party applications for use across multiple social networks.
Members

MySpace
Bebo
Six Apart
LinkedIn
Ning
Orkut
Salesforce
Hi5
Plaxo
Friendster

Open Web Foundation

An independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Assignments

Investigate some of the above-listed new Web trends toward "open".

Please feel free to use, distribute, and remix this course, it is licensed under a CC-BY-SA open license:

The Open Movement and Libraries Course by Ellyssa Kroski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Special thanks to these professors who made their syllabi & materials openly available for others to learn from and build upon:

Dr. David Wiley

INST 7150

Open Education

http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus

and

Heather Morrison

LIBR 559K

Open Access

http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/syllabi/07-08-st1/l559k.htm

LIBR 559L

Topics in Scholarly Communication

http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/LIBR559L