Firefox 3, the latest version of the popular open source web browser, has a great new feature that can speed up work for library patrons who do a lot of searching. In this quick video tutorial I give a brief overview on how to use smart keywords in the address bar to search the library from any page on the net.
Instructions
Right-click on any search box.
Choose “Add keyword for this search.”
Give the keyword a title/name. (This will be the name that will be stored in your bookmarks.)
Choose a short keyword to use the search. For example, I chose “lib” for the main library search and “cat” for catalog searches.
Now just type your keyword and then your search phrase in the address bar, hit return and watch the magic happen. (example: lib “your search phrase”)
Google’s latest beta product, Chrome, was announced today as an open source product. As per my last post to this blog, I don’t like to use the phrase “Open Source” in this context since the product was designed and built completely by Google and then released to the public under an open source license. In my mind the software is not truly open source, but rather free software.
Of course, as any web developer would, I had to give it a spin as soon as I had a chance. I am impressed - the software has a nice touch of animations which makes for a smooth a clean UI. Something that I wouldn’t expect to be a major feature in a Google product. The most impressive feature is the merging of the search and URL bar together. I think this is something that should have been in browsers for a long time.
Now for the real test - memory footprint. On my windows XP work station, I started both browsers and compared the memory usage. Firefox was using almost twice: 44k vs. 28k for Chrome. Now this isn’t the most scientific test, especially since I have at least a dozen plugins installed in Firefox. But impressive still.
We will have to leave it up to daily use to see how well it actually performs and how many people will make the switch.
We are pleased to announce that our open source project, VuFind, has been recognzied as a 2008 recipient of SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Awards in the books category.
We are really happy to see our project show up on a list of social giants with millions of users, such as del.icio.us and flickr, and even happier that other library software efforts such as Worldcat and LibraryThing showed up on this list as well.
Recently, I created a series of posters to fill a display case over the summer lull. I am posting them here for other libraries to download, customize, and use for their own promotion (or just to brighten up a cubicle).
Anyone who has seen the documentary Revolution OS knows this battle that has been going on for possibly decades. Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU rants and raves about how all software must be free. The other side of the battle lines say that software can be free or it can be commercial - but it should be open.
So I ask this question in a new light (or at least a new light for me). Let me paint a picture for you - If a commercial entity, say X Corp, announces the development of a piece of software that they are developing themselves and calling it “open source” - is it truly Open Source?
To me - a company who built a software product and then releases it as “Open Source” is just releasing it for free and simply creating “free” software that will be much more effective if the customer buys into X Corp’s support and customization services.
I feel the best approach for open source software is to start a software revision repository (CVS, SVN, Git, etc) that can be accessible to the public (read-only with defined committers is the general practice) and commit the very first line of code to it. Let someone download a 1 line of code application if they so want to - but make the very 1st line of code open to the community at large. It seems that developers tend to resist doing this since that 1st line of code will be buggy and the community may react and say, “well this is crap!” But a “release often, release early” model will help the community understand your level of commitment to the project and help understand the future progress. The community may also submit code, bug fixes, or just ideas early on. While this can be a project managment nightmare - it can lead to strong community buy-in.
Surely (and don’t call me Shirley), there is an effective business model for Open Source software. But does building the software first and then releasing it to the community at large truley encouraging open collaboration - or are they just ploying people by the “free” licensing charge?
We are proud to share a major redesign we have completed (or 95% completed) of our Digital Library. This is a full HTML & CSS facelift with additional features to come in the future.
While some of you may not be familiar with the old design, what we are especially happy with in this process is how the new design better illuminates the hierarchical data structure and creates a new separation between the act of browsing documents and the act of viewing a document.
A little about our DigLib: The site is currently running on a system written by Andrew Nagy in PHP with an eXist XML database. In the near future we will be running our documents through a server-side OCR process and indexing the full-text of the documents, converting Tiffs to JPEG2000 to create a better zoom feature, and doing more with dynamic PDF creation. Even further into the future we will be exploring the possibility of putting our software out as an open source package.
We still have lots to do, but I would love to have any feedback.
