This Slashdot story about a Dan Gilmore article was the second story I’ve read today about Linux on the desktop appearing more viable. Earlier I’d seen a Chad Dickerson column in InfoWorld. Both were about the ease with which they had installed and used the Xandros Linux distribution. Come to think of it, a few days back I’d read this story about ZeroInstall on top of a Linux desktop/filer named ROX. ROX seems to have application bundles done right and used that to create an outstanding simple method of installing software. All of these stories are impressing me with how functional Linux is becoming on the desktop. It kind of makes me want to install Linux on an old laptop some time and see what it is like. I love my MacOS X machine, but I also like the idea of strong software on our existing Intel hardware base in the Libraries. I wonder how far we are from a viable choice to move our public and staff machines to Linux?

I like my brother Christopher’s vision of leadership. He calls us to dare to be brave. Easier said than done, though he has been pretty good at doing it lately. Luckily, Christopher is working on a book that may add a few more hints for us mere mortals!

Nature hosted an interesting dabate on open access a few years back. Now it is at it again with a new web focus on access to the literature. This discussion got going last month, and even the University of Minnesota’s own Andrew Odlezko has chimed in with a piece. The content of this discussion should be available even to non-subscribers. Give it a try!

Cool! We were pleased to launch our own open source project a few months back (see LibData), so I’m always happy to see new open source library projects on the block. Today I got word about OLinks from OhioLINK.Tom Sanville wrote:

Some you know already know that OhioLINK has created its own URL resolver for journals and other materials. OLinks is an open-source OpenURL resolver intended for use by library consortia, individual libraries, and other organizations with a need to manage citation linking using the OpenURL standard. Introductory information can be found at [this site]. As noted on the site, you are advised to contact Thomas Dowling on the OhioLINK staff if you are interested in using it.

Thank you, OhioLINK!

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, was published with a Creative Commons license with allows for derivative works. The result has been an amazing flurry of derivatives, including an audio version launched by AKMA. Does this demonstrate in any way a relationship between freeing content and creativity? Are we well served by dozens of versions of Lessig’s work? Are we diminishing his own incentive to create?

It seems that wiki’s are getting more mainstream every day. We’ve been participating in a Humanities project with the LOCKSS folks at Stanford. I just got a message from Vicky Reich letting us know that LOCKSS has set up a wiki for the project. She says:

Wikis are widely used to facilitate collaboration via the Web -”wiki-wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”. The biggest Wiki in use is the Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page The software is fairly easy to use and facilitates documentation and collaboration. We find them fun and extremely useful. We will be adding access control so only humanity project team members will have read and write privileges.

That last reiterates a way in which the wiki way will be compromised as they do hit the mainstream: wiki’s are founded on open editorial access, but many mainstream wikis (including our staff web server) will insist on some access control.

I’ve been working on redesigning our staff web for the past couple weeks and am very pleased with the results of using a collaborative tool called a wiki. We are using PmWiki, one of many wiki engines out there. So far PmWiki has been a great way to enforce a common template on a site, yet keep the site very open to editorial input from a broad range of players who don’t have much HTML experience. Now the real acid test… Will the staff like the new site and help us maintain it? After all, one of the main problems with the old site has been how stale it gets. Will the more open editing framework of a collaborative wiki site really result in fresher content that the staff feels more ownership for? We’ll see…

An entry at blog.org points to an interesting paper (PDF) on visualizing the state of a discussion online. I think it is helpful to see folks pushing past text as a way to represent the vigor and other attributes of online interaction. I wonder how we can use visualization techniques to reintroduce serendipitous browsing through library collections in an age when our libraries are often decentralized (no “main library”) and full of electronic resources (nothing “on the shelf”)?

An entry at blog.org points to an interesting paper (PDF) on visualizing the state of a discussion online. I think it is helpful to see folks pushing past text as a way to represent the vigor and other attributes of online interaction. I wonder how we can use visualization techniques to reintroduce serendipitous browsing through library collections in an age when our libraries are often decentralized (no “main library”) and full of electronic resources (nothing “on the shelf”)?

It looks like the University Libraries blog service is now up and live. I didn’t really follow through with any blogging in the past couple weeks, so I’d better get on the ball. I do want to congratulate the team in our Digital Libraries Development Lab for getting this service off the ground. We will be introducing the service to two University Senate committees in the next two weeks and I hope that we can help them grasp what an exciting opportunity for scholarly communication this represents. Kudos to Shane and Company for nurturing this concept!