Tag Archives: United States

Another perspective on haves and have nots

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A lot has been written in other blogs, in conference reports, in articles and elsewhere about the growing technology gap between the “haves” and the “have nots.”  It definitely exists; what is debatable is how rapidly the gap is increasing.  I was interested to note on a TV monitor in my company’s cafeteria a brief report about a recent Pew study that estimated that 15% of the U.S. population has neither a cell phone nor a computer, and that prompted me to write this entry.

I am a pretty tech-savvy person.  I have probably wasted more time and money on techie things than is healthy for me (although, I would argue, the time and money weren’t all wasted).  I have had high speed Internet connectivity at home since 2001 and used dial up connectivity for at least ten years before that.  I have used a cell phone since the early 90s.  My work has centered on networked connectivity for at least that long, and I use a computer on average about eight hours a day and probably longer, not just at work but at home as well.  I haven’t had a print newspaper subscription since the early 90s, relying instead on the Internet to deliver the news and information I needed.

In spite of my techie orientation and experience, I, too, experience this technology gap at times.  For instance, when I first heard about Twitter from Steven Cohen several weeks ago, I was intrigued and signed up for the service just to dabble with it and understand what it can do.  But it really didn’t “click” with me much; I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was with it and why so many people were so enthusiastic about it.  That is, until I bought a Blackberry along with its QWERTY keyboard and constant wireless connectivity.  I used my Blackberry to post to Twitter quite a bit to report to friends and family about the trip to Mayo Clinic with my wife.  Twitter didn’t make much sense to me until I had the right equipment, something that I had at hand at all times, which I could pull out and quickly type in a brief statement here and there.  This may seem a minor example of a technological gap, and it is.  But my point is that even among the technorati, so much of what is gushed over and around which enthusiastic user communities are founded, is based on access to equipment (hardware, but software as well) that relatively few people, even today, can afford, or can use, e.g. because of lack of service, low bandwidth, or whatever.  The Pew report mentioned above highlights this reality.

I’m lucky.  I can usually afford technology.  I live in a high population area with a ton of service options that provide high performance and relatively low cost.  When we lived in rural east central Indiana for three years, however, it was a far different story.  I couldn’t get good cell reception so I stopped using a cell phone, for instance.  And although we had high speed cable Internet at home, it was pricey.  I mentioned that I now have a Blackberry.  I wouldn’t be able to afford that at all if it weren’t for the fact that I work for a large company and as a side benefit am able to receive significant discounts on cell phones and services.  Without those discounts, I would not have a Blackberry at all.

Another point about the “haves” vs. “have nots” when it comes to technology, is that not everything shiny and new is highly adoptable.  Take RSS vs. email as an example.  This blog was set up to mainly communicate with family and friends, and I estimate that only a very small percentage of that target audience a.) knows what on earth RSS is, and b.) cares to make use of it in any way.  Instead, anecdotal evidence has shown me that it is far more likely that family and friends will simply go to this website to check to see if I have written anything new.  A large portion of my target audience doesn’t even remember to do that.  By way of contrast, when I communicate with my target audience via email, it’s an entirely different story.  I am able to regularly communicate with family and friends via email, and that is much more accessible and usable to them, than RSS will likely ever be.  Another example of a technology gap is with the use of instant messaging services.  I love using IM and now I am logged on to at least four different services almost every day.  In spite of that, only a very tiny fraction of family and friends regularly uses IM, preferring email instead.  I’d love to use IM more regularly to keep in more constant communication with them, but hardly any of them uses it.

I’m certain that I haven’t made any revelatory points here but this issue is something I have been mulling over for a while.  Call it the frustration of a technogeek when the people with whom he most wants to communicate don’t use the tools he loves to use for that purpose :-)   Let’s not even talk about stuff like MySpace or even Second Life, which are really foreign planets.

Some crystal ball reflections

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Recently my mentee at UIUC GSLIS asked me to look into my crystal ball and articulate some thoughts about what lies in store for technical services librarianship. What follows is my response. I publish this here because although my points aren’t polished and well-defined, what I wrote to my mentee expresses some of what I personally think about library-related topics that are popular right now.

Where do I start?! Those who work in tech. svcs. are in need, more than ever, of a management mindset. Not necessarily management responsibilities, but a management mindset. By this I mean that we need to understand the broader pressures and trends that managers, especially upper-level managers, have to cope with and prepare for. We can no longer be (if we ever were) narrowly focused on, say, cataloging of print books and only print books. This luxury only exists in a handful of really large or special libraries. We need to be very aware of user-oriented trends such as the whole “social web” or Web 2.0 discussion, and how that might alter user expectations of what we provide to them in terms of access paths to information.

In terms of concerns and anxieties, well…I am reminded of a quote I always see in the signature of emails written by a friend of mine: “Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby.” This causes a smile to come to me every time I see it. Put simply, I worry that in the rush toward new technologies, new ways of interacting with and meeting the needs of users, too many of my colleagues find it easy to forget or ignore what is in the past. In many ways I do believe the Bible verse that states something like this: “There is nothing new under the sun.” I believe this has application in libraries. We are not to be bound (pardon the small pun) by the past, necessarily, but we at least need to acknowledge a.) that there is a past and b.) understand at least some of that past to put the present and future into a right perspective. I’ve said this to people over and over again and I’ll repeat it here as an example of this point. About 10 years ago, when I was new to the profession, one of the really hot topics was outsourcing of technical services work. People were either up in arms against this trend or actively applauding it as revolutionary and innovative. Truth is, it was neither. Outsourcing has existed for a very long time in libraries and one big example of this is in the realm of shared cataloging. The Library of Congress distributed its cataloging records on 3×5 cards to other libraries throughout the U.S. and (maybe) the world, as long ago as the early 1900s. That is outsourcing!

Particularly in this era of the “social web” I am worried by so many librarians who are leading “the revolution” and proclaiming how wonderful and how great everything is that relates to blogs, wikis, instant messaging, etc. Those things ARE great but please, folks, get some perspective on them! Understand that libraries have ALWAYS striven to be social and interactive and patron-oriented. The way some of the library technorati talk these days, you’d think that libraries have been forbidding prisons until the social web came about. That’s ridiculous. Most of what is new is actually evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Don’t get me wrong: I am heartily in favor of trying new things, of experimenting, of innovating, etc. My wife calls me a technogeek and I guess that’s an accurate made-up word. My problem is just that new developments need to be understood and perceived through the lens of historical perspective.

Chicago as possible site for Olympics

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I was excited to read the news last night that Chicago was picked over Los Angeles as the site nominated by the U.S. for the 2016 Olympics. How cool would it be to live near the Olympics, if Chicago happens to win the international bid? I think Chicago is a great choice (prejudice aside). Chicago has a history of making very big things happen. Think of the famous 1893 Columbian Exposition. I’ve known about that event for most of my life but never really understood how important and “big” that whole event was until I read the excellent book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I am particularly excited by the prospect of new venues built in and around Washington Park near my old stomping grounds at the University of Chicago, which was a key part of Chicago’s bid. Interestingly, my place of work (and even some people in my department) is playing a key supporting role in trying to make this dream happen for Chicago.

Link to Chicago is U.S. candidate to host 2016 Games – Yahoo! News

Seven years

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It is hard for me to believe that today marks our seventh wedding anniversary. Sometimes it seems like time has flown by, and at other times, it seems like we’ve been married for longer than seven years. We are really blessed. Some of the events of the past seven years include the following:

  • three more children (Keegan was eight years old when we married)
  • three household moves
  • the death of my father
  • my mother-in-law’s hospitalization and long recovery from dilated cardiomyopathy, as well as a later surgery to replace both of her knees
  • the death of both of Michele’s grandfathers
  • the death of one of Michele’s uncles as well as two uncles and an aunt of mine
  • the legal adoption of Keegan as my son
  • Michele’s extended neurological illness (which has since reoccurred)
  • my hospitalizations for meningitis and other weird ailments including a severe case of the shingles
  • purchase of two different minivans, and the sale of a car and one of those minivans
  • the adoption of three dogs, two parakeets, several kittens, and several freshwater fish
  • three job changes on my part
  • three graduate courses taught
  • more than 15 emergency room visits
  • thousands of miles traveled to/from relatives and one plane trip as a family (to Maine)
  • the purchase of two Mac computers
  • several business trips made by me, including a trip to Sweden, two trips to the UK, and trips to various parts of the U.S.
  • several other funerals and marriages of friends
  • the marriages of a niece and a nephew

I’m surely forgetting some other important milestones, but this list covers a lot as it is. Happy anniversary to us!

EndUser 2006 notes on opening session [Updated]

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[Through a series of missteps that I won't go into here, I discovered that I had accidentally deleted this post, first published a few weeks ago. I feel pretty dumb. When I figured out what happened, I sat here, stunned, wondering what to do. Then I remembered Google's good 'ol caching capability, did a quick search to call up the cached version of this post, did a quick copy and paste, and voila, problem solved. Well, almost. My error wiped out the original post entirely, meaning that it automatically broke the link to that post, as well. There's nothing I can do about that. In the process of reconstituting the content, I decided on some editorial tweaks throughout.]

(Warning, this is a pretty lengthy post.)

Yesterday was the start of EndUser 2006, Endeavor’s customer conference. Somewhere around 1,000 customers have shown up for this event, some coming from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, several European countries, as well as Canada, Latin America, and of course, the U.S. As I’ve noted before, there are several conference sessions dealing with topics of interest, but yesterday’s highlight was the opening general session featuring a representative from Google who spoke in depth about Google’s Book Search project. Tom Turvey, Head, Google Book Search Partnerships, gave a brief over of Google and how it makes money, defined the elements of Google Book Search, described the Google Book Search Partner Program (which he oversees), and finally discussed the Library Program portion of Google Book Search. Tom has a long history of working with online content, serving in numerous roles in the publishing industry relating to online delivery, including launching Barnes & Noble’s ebook offerings and most recently holding a senior post at HarperCollins.

Tom began by describing Google’s business. He mentioned that Google now provides 59% of all Internet search referrals. Google’s oft-repeated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their Its core business, i.e. how they the company makes money, is from advertising revenue generated via paid search ads using Google AdSense. Tom also mentioned that Google is the leader, by far, in referrals to book sites (currently it processes about 60% of all such referrals). In describing Google’s business, Tom pointed out some interesting statistics about book purchasing. He provided statistics showing that 13% Thirteen percent of all book purchases are now done online; schools/libraries make up about 24% of the book buying market, direct to consumer purchasing (direct from publishers) is about 2%; and the biggest growth area recently has been in non bookstore retail (books being purchased in Costco, Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart, etc.).

The next portion of the presentation focused on an explanation of Google Book Search. Tom pointed out that in his experience, never has there been so much misinformation about a product as there has been with Google Book Search (GBS). He made some comment that 90% of what has been published in the news media is false, thus the importance of explaining exactly what it’s about. GBS, at its heart, is an attempt to associate book content with what searchers are looking for in search engines. There are two main parts to GBS: the Partner Program, and the Library Program. The Partner Program involves relationships and agreements between Google and publishers. GBS launched in October 2004 at the Frankfort Book Fair. As of now there are literally thousands of publisher partners spanning seven languages. One of the most frequent questions publishers ask Google is, what books are good choices for discovery via GBS? One of Tom’s funnier statements was “we don’t need to help Harry Potter find an audience.” What Google is mostly interested in is the arcane, the obscure, and bringing this material to light via searching GBS. Every page is searchable; users are searching books from cover to cover. There are two ways of providing search on book content: a dedicated search (books.google.com), and integrating book content within the general Google search. The main intent of working with publishers is to drive book sales. Content is protected in a variety of ways (Tom mentioned that as you can imagine, this element of agreements with publishers often gets “into the weeds”). Only 20% of a book is viewable by one user during the course of a month. Print, copy, and save are disabled. Scanned images are purposely low resolution. Publishers can add/remote remove their material at any time. There is page level security as well. A percentage of pages is never visible at one time. Google’s process for receiving publisher content is pretty straightforward: the publisher usually sends either a PDF or a print copy. If the latter, Google digitizes it. As an interesting aside to closing out this portion of the talk, Tom mentioned “Oh by the way, the five publishers who are suing Google over the Library Project are actually members of the Partner Program.”

In turning to the third and last portion of the presentation, Tom outlined the elements of the Library Project. Partner libraries, as most people are aware by now, include Stanford, NYPL, Oxford, Michigan, and Harvard. In researching and comparing collections from each partner library, Google discovered that 60% of books are held in only one of the partner libraries. For legal and other issues, Google began the project by focusing on public domain books. However, public domain books make up only about 20% of a typical library collection. Ten percent of a typical collection is made up of books that are still in print (i.e. the stuff that is handled via the Partner Program). Most books, 90%, are in print but in a fuzzy area in which they may be out of print but still in copyright, or perhaps out of copyright. Seventy percent of collections were published after 1923 and fall into three categories: in copyright, in public domain, or the rights may have reverted. Obviously Google needed to figure out how to solve or address these complexities. Their solution was to offer to scan everything but provide three views: sample pages (partner view), snippet view (book under copyright w/out agreement with a publisher partner), and full book view (book is in public domain). The snippet view means that the full text of each book is indexed; users can only view three snippets from the book; there are links to “buy this book” as well as “find in a library”; different categories of books are handled in different ways; and copyright holders may opt out of display and/or scanning.

Obviously a critical factor for Google is optimizing and streamlining the workflow. For example, a key consideration was figuring out how long it takes to scan a typical book. Tom mentioned that in the early days of the project, founder Larry Brin and another staff member would use a metronome to time each other over and over again as they tried to figure out how best to scan a book. (Why a metronome? I have no idea and neither did Tom.) Books are scanned as is, including scribbles, marginalia, notes, whatever. Google is aiming to build a comprehensive collection of indexed books but has a long way to go yet on achieving that goal. Some of the challenges they face on a daily basis are 100% OCR accuracy, 100% image quality, search and integration with web search, the accuracy of any affiliated metadata, the existence of lots of “edge cases” in terms of how to process and display the scanned results, how to address books that contain multiple languages and/or scripts; and how best to achieve a good level of speed/automation of the entire process. As with their much vaunted (and top secret) search algorithms, Google is constantly tweaking the process to try to improve the quality. How do they handle math formulas, spelling correction (Tom used the example of vernacular language that is meant to be spelled a certain way but which looks wrong to a typical spell checker), etc.? What is the best way to deal with automated metadata extraction? Can they figure out an automated way to detect (and appropriately handle) different languages and/or scripts?

Tom made a big point of the fact that Google is actively engaging the library community. Librarians tell Google the good and the bad about GBS (e.g. of bad: too overwhelming for users, hard to know which stuff is authoritative and what is junk, desire to know exactly how the process for scanning and indexing works). Google wants to ensure that GBS works for libraries by making information more discoverable, driving more library usage, and supporting a worldwide community, which is especially relevant for remote and distributed library users. Google has no desire whatsoever to put libraries out of business; in fact, Tom claims that the opposite is true.

[One of the things that I thought was particularly striking was that at one point during the session, Mr. Turvey asked for a show of hands from the audience of those people who were aware of the facts and details he had provided about Google Book Search. To my astonishment, I was one of the few people to raise their hands. Maybe this was just due to some people not fully understanding the question or to some people's innate shyness, who knows. But if it was an indicator of professional ignorance of these matters, then we're in big trouble.]

After concluding his prepared remarks, Tom invited the audience to pose questions. This was perhaps the most interesting portion of the session and Tom handled the questions with aplomb and a dose of wit. Below are my notes of the substance of some of the questions posed, followed by the substance of what I could jot down of Tom’s answers.

Question: When a user sees a link to “find in a library” which leads to Open WorldCat, what librarians want is to have that user come to us rather than use Google and/or buy the book from the publisher. What is your view on this?
Answer: It appears that this is in fact what is happening. Logs show that adding the “find in a library” link, directed to Open WorldCat, has driven a tremendous growth in traffic to WorldCat. Presumably this leads to higher library use.

Question: I’d like to see much more powerful search options, including things like truncation, proximity searching, and boolean capabilities. Is this something Google is considering?
Answer: That’s a very good question, what I’d expect from a librarian <laughter from the audience>. Some of these capabilities are things we are indeed working on, while some of them are already available via the Advanced Search option.

Question: I believe that in search results from publisher content, there is no link to “find in a library” when there is such a link provided in the library search. Why is that?
Answer: Good question. Remember that the goal of GBS is to have a relevant search. The vast majority of books available in GBS at this time are from publishers. Over the next few years, that proportion will flip to emphasize library-owned material. Honestly there is a constant tug and pull between publishers and Google over this issue of how to direct users. Publishers, obviously, participate in GBS to sell more books.

Question: Is there any plan to include Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) as part of the GBS search?
Answer: LCSH and other taxonomies are already used to some extent behind the scenes to assist with determining relevance as well as identifying relationships between books (linking from one book to a related book).

Question: Can you speak about why you are being sued by some of your publisher partners?
Answer: Attorneys love it when you talk publicly about their litigation <much laughter from audience>. Seriously, though, no, I can’t answer that.

Question: Are you indexing each book cover to cover (i.e. full text)? How do you determine relevancy? [Editorial aside: Was this person paying attention? This question was clearly answered in the context of the presentation.]
Answer: Yes, we are doing full text. The ranking/relevancy algorithms used in GBS are pretty much the same as those used in the regular Google search. Some tweaking is of course necessary to make the algorithms relevant for book search. We do user interface testing every month and as a result, we constantly tweak/change the algorithms.

Question: Do you have a formal digital preservation strategy?
Answer: We have agreements with our library partners that cover preservation to whatever degree they have specified in their legal agreements. It really depends on what partner libraries want. Other than that, no, we do not have a formal preservation strategy and do not feel that that is a role we should assume.

Question: Elaborate on how relevant metadata is in GBS.
Answer: Well, first of all, metadata does play a role in GBS but our bias is always toward full text, with metadata/abstracts thought of as secondary. This is probably the opposite of how most libraries would prioritize things.

Question: I have a question on the issue of fair use. Are you working to expand the concept of fair use in terms of scholarly material in particular?
Answer: We feel that our stance on fair use and GBS is very, very significant. We do not have any formal focus on scholarly material in GBS, though.

Question: What is Google’s stance toward the Open Content Alliance? Does Google view them as partners, or competitors?
Answer: We have an open door, a desire to partner and share in digitizing material. We believe that initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance are worthy of our support. However, as you can imagine, there are certain complexities and a lot of politics involved in this kind of interaction. We want to participate in initiatives like this in as open a way as possible.

Question: “Find in a library” links only to WorldCat at present. Does Google have any plans for directing traffic to other bibliographic (i.e. library) databases (this is particularly important for those libraries who aren’t linked from WorldCat)?
Answer: We’d be interested in any other worthwhile bibliographic databases, but WorldCat is it for now.

Question: A single search box is very attractive, but when you expand your data sources (as Google is doing), the simplicity and relevance of this one search become more difficult to maintain. How do you handle this?
Answer: We constantly reevaluate the one box concept and it is an ongoing problem to solve. There is no ready answer.

Question: How do you handle materials from publishers once those materials have gone out of print?
Answer: Good question. Once a publisher’s book goes out of print, they request that it be removed from the index and then it no longer appears in the search. The exception to this would be if there happens to be a copy of that same book that has been scanned and indexed as part of the Library Project. In that case, the book would remain in the index.

Question: Do you have plans for providing regional Google book searches (e.g. one for New Zealand imprints)? This is important for those outside of the U.S. because currently there is such a predominance of U.S. imprints in GBS.
Answer: We already do this, e.g. currently we have 65 regional book searches.

Question: The exposure from GBS for libraries is great, but it needs to be more two way, e.g. to direct users looking for material in a local library catalog to GBS and/or elsewhere. Are there any plans to extend the Google API to be used by libraries for integration into their online catalogs?
Answer: Something like this functionality is present in Google Scholar. We are very happy with this integration with library services and we want to figure out ways to extend this further.

Question: What’s your view on library’s development of customized Greasemonkey scripts to integrate library results in with GBS?
Answer: Anything that doesn’t violate copyright, we’re all for.

Question: GBS is very exciting. What about developing Google Journals?
Answer: <tongue in cheek> …So we have this thing called Google Scholar…Actually we are working ways to better integrate or link between GBS and Google Scholar.

Question: There is clearly a balance of power issue relating to the premise that allowing Google to do all this scanning and digitizing of book content puts the burden of proof on the content creator rather than the user. What are your thoughts about this?
Answer: We believe that this is a very important issue and our stance on this hinges on the belief that we are simply being consistent between the indexing of website content and indexing the content of books.

Question: What about working to include government documents, because they do no present a copyright problem?
Answer: Yes, we have a team devoted to this very issue. It is a bigger challenge to do this than it may at first appear because in order to do it we need to work out who is responsible (i.e. the publisher) of the multitude of gov docs. Expect progress on this front.

Blog visitors: some interesting facts and figures [Updated]

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I’ve been using Google Analytics since mid-November 2005 to gain some knowledge about who visits this blog, how much traffic it generates, and from where. It’s not a perfect tool but hey, it’s free and it’s easy to use. I’ve read that others question the results given to them by Google Analytics and I think it is a good policy to try to track usage in more than one way (e.g. by adding in analysis of server logs, depending on whether your ISP provides access to that kind of information).

It’s now been about two months since I put in place the necessary tracking code. Here are some interesting facts and figures that I’ve come up with so far:

  • the site averages about 21 visitors each day (interestingly, that corresponds exactly to the number of subscribers it has on Bloglines)
  • about 37% of visitors are recurring and 63% of them are new during that two month timeframe
  • visitors come from all over the world, including (as far as I can tell) the following countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Spain, France, Israel, Hungary, and Poland.
  • visitors find their way here mainly via Google, Technorati, or by entering the URL to this site (what Google Analytics terms ‘direct’)

I have seen steady growth in access these last few months. The traffic this site gets (and therefore its ‘impact’) is quite low, but that’s fine with me. It’s just kind of fun to know a bit about visitors, especially where they come from.

[Update: For reasons I don't quite understand yet, I discovered this a.m. that if I look at Google Analytics results for this site on a weekly basis, I get different results than if I choose to view the results for the complete length of time I have had Google Analytics running (approximately since mid-November 2005). The above statistics are derived from a two month summary rather than from analyzing results week by week. One major difference is the fact that a much larger number of countries are sources for visitors to this site than I had previously believed. These include China, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Czech Republic. I think this is pretty incredible geographic coverage for a very low traffic, English language site, and it gives real meaning to WORLD Wide Web.]

E-Archiving tools the next big thing? [Updated]

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Some recent developments and announcements make me think that e-archiving solutions may be the next big thing in the world of information technology and libraries. Certainly, things are heating up in this area. Several weeks ago the National Archives of the U.S. announced a contract with Lockheed Martin to develop a tool known as the Electronic Records Archive (ERA). More recently, the Library of Congress gave $3 million to support development of an e-archive solution named Portico, being developed by a non-profit organization called Ithaka Harbors, Inc., which appears to be a spinoff of JSTOR and the Mellon Foundation. Just today, Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. and Sun Microsystems announced a partnership to develop their own e-archiving solution(s). (Full disclosure: Endeavor Information Systems, Inc. is my employer.)

A good weekend

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Thanks to having yesterday off (it was Columbus Day here in the U.S.), we enjoyed a longer-than-usual weekend. Rather than try to finish unpacking boxes from the move and clean up the general mess, we decided to try to do some fun things. Saturday we visited a Japanese market called Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights and enjoyed the sense that we were visiting that country. We picked up some red bean cakes and miso soup mix as well as some other things. It was quite stressful to shop there with four children in a very crowded store. Still, it was fascinating and worth the trip. Michele and I agreed that next time we go, we should pick a day that is less busy and preferably, sans kids. Sunday I went to church and then afterward, we drove up to Lake Geneva, just across the border in Wisconsin. Yesterday we decided to visit the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Much to their surprise, the kids really enjoyed it. The weather was nearly perfect for the trip, sunny but cool. I’ll add photos from the gardens to my Flickr account soon but in the meantime, I loaded some new photos of the kids taken over the weekend by Michele and me with our new digital camera.

Using comics to promote free or open source software use (Updated)

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Tectonic — Linux and open source news

I was notified of this news item via a PubSub alert and I’m glad I took a look at it. This blog (Tectonic: Africa’s Source for Open Source News) entry talks about a method for getting the word out about free or open source software in Namibia. The problem appears to be with teachers or educators, who don’t seem to know much about what is freely available for classroom use. If you find this interesting enough to follow the link (above), be sure to click on the graphic showing a comic. I did, and found mention of things like Wikipedia, OpenOffice, and Project Gutenberg. Interesting!

Many people don’t stop to think about the international benefits of these kinds of projects. I know that many librarians in third world countries are very interested in or are already using open source library software like Koha. A few years ago, I met with two librarians from Kenya, Charles and [Daniel], for the purpose of helping them (along with colleagues from Wheaton College, who were much more heavily involved with them, e.g. in sponsoring their U.S. trip) investigate Koha and/or other free software that they could use to automate their libraries. Charles and [Daniel] are leaders in the library world in that country. I hope that they and others are also paying attention to open-ils.org, a.k.a. the Evergreen Project in the state of Georgia here in the U.S.