If you have any programmer/software engineer staff at all, you should be
looking for other universities to collaborate with on _shared code base_
open source solutions. And allocating resources to that. That could be
Evergreen or Koha, or it could be something other than an ILS (say, the
SOLR type solution you mentioned before).
But what I think we need to progress is more shared codebase true open
source projects. Koha and Evergreen count. But what I'm particularly
meaning to exclude are the sorts of solutions: "Here's something I put
together for our own specific situation; you are welcome to take the
code and modify it however you want." In the open source world, that
ends up being one kind of what's called a "fork"---in the end, everyone
is using similar code, but not the same code, so improvements made by
one are harder to share with others. It takes more up front effort to
have code where everyone is really using exactly the _same_ code
(configured differently; the more time up front is building in the
proper configuration support), but gives you serious dividends down the
line. It's that kind of effort that will give us seriously better software.
Jonathan
Stephens, Owen wrote:
> I promised a thread on this in my earlier email
>
> I'm in the lucky(?) position of being able to influence and make
> decisions, and have some resource which I can direct once a direction is
> decided. So, where should I be investing my effort in terms of
> influence, my money, and my staff time to progress the NGC at my
> institution?
>
> As a starter for 10, I feel that I should be looking at implementing a
> disaggregated user facing search engine (Primo, Vufind, Endeca,
> SOLR/Lucene, Siderean - any others for this pot?) - I'm almost afraid to
> ask if there are any recommendations as to which one...
>
> What other things should I be doing?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Owen
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Sep 12 2007 - 11:20:30 EDT