oss4lib

As seen on oss4lib-discuss, Jeremy wrote: "We are pleased to announce the first public release of the LibraryFind metasearch software, developed by Oregon State University Libraries. LibraryFind is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This first public release, version 0.7, has a number of advanced features, such as (but not limited to): 2-click user workflow (one click to find, one click to get), an integrated OpenURL resolver, a 2-tiered caching system to improve search response time, and a customizable user interface. As this is a pre-1.0 release, there are still a number of features, functions, and efficiencies we plan to add to the software. We encourage involvement from others in the library community who are interested in working on an open source metasearch product. More information on LibraryFind, including information on how to download and run the software, can be found at libraryfind.org."

I've been working on this project, and am excited to see it out there finally. There's a lot of good stuff in there already, and I'm sure that we'll be able to improve on it rapidly with many more eyeballs on it.

From freshmeat: "This is a significant release of Fedora that includes a complete repackaging as a proper Web application. A new installer application makes it easy to setup and run. It now uses Servlet Filters for authentication. The Fedora repository can also be configured to calculate and store checksums for content. The RDF-based Resource Index has been tuned for better performance. A new high-performing RDBMS-backed triplestore has been developed that can now be plugged into the RI."

For full details see the release notes at fedora.info.

Michele writes: "HyperJournal is a free software application that facilitates the administration of academic journals on the Web. HyperJournal is designed according to an intuitive and elegant layout, it permits the installation, personalization, and administration of a dedicated Web site at extremely low cost and without the need for special IT-competence. HyperJournal can be used not only to establish an online version of an existing paper periodical, but also to create an entirely new, solely electronic journal."

Ronda writes: "The Fedora Development Team is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 2.0 and the launch of the new Fedora website. New features in 2.0 include Fedora Object XML (FOXML) Ingest and Export with Different XML Formats; Relationship Metadata for Digital Objects; Resource Index Module; Batch Modify Utility; Repository Administrator Reporting Tools; Example Client for Making SOAP calls to Fedora APIs Third Party Library Upgrades; Performance Tuning; API-A and API-A-LITE Changes; API-M Changes; PID Definition Syntrax Relaxed; Including PID as Default Parameter in Disseminations; Syntax of Timestamp Values Extended; Redesign of Fedora Web Site and Documentation; Fedora Tutorials. Additionally, 16 bugs have been corrected in this release. Full information about the new features and code corrections is available in the release notes.

Installation and migration instructions are also available. If you have any questions about this release, please address them to fedora_support@virginia.edu."

Terry writes: "I've posted an OAI Harvester written in .NET (C#) on Sourceforge. The harvester was designed to work pretty much like the OAI::Harvester perl module by Ed Summers, but was designed in C# so that users building web applications in ASP, ASP.NET or stand-alone clients could utilize the component. Like OAI::Harvester, this component has built-in support for Dublin Core, but can be passed custom handlers for handling different metadata schemas. One of the things on my todo list is to provide a built-in package for MARCXML. While the component is written in C#, the software will run on any platform that has either the MONO 1.0 or .NET 1.1 runtimes (program has been tested on Fedora Core 2, Slackware 10 and Windows XP). On SourceForge, I've included three packages: the component; an example program; the component and the example program in one download. Online documentation is available. The component is being released by myself and Oregon State University Libraries under the general GPL."

VDC writes: "The Virtual Data Center (VDC) is an OSS digital library system "in a box" for numeric data. VDC provides a complete open-source, digital library system for the management, dissemination, exchange, and citation of virtual collections of quantitative data. The VDC functionality provides everything necessary to maintain and disseminate an individual collection of research studies: including facilities for the storage, archiving, cataloging, translation, and dissemination of each collection. On-line analysis is provided, powered by the R Statistical environment. The system provides extensive support for distributed and federated collections including: location-independent naming of objects, distributed authentication and access control, federated metadata harvesting, remote repository caching, and distributed virtual collections of remote objects. Release 1.0 of the VDC provides RPM's for Redhat 9.0, Fedora 1 Core and Redhat 3 Advance Server. Supported standards and protocols and formats include: DDI, Dublin Core, and MARC for metadata; R,SPSS, SAS,ASCII, and STATA for data ; OAI and Z39.50 for queries; UNF's and Handles for naming/citation."

Ronda wrote in with a press release, most of which is available at the Fedora site. From the version 1.1 release notes, this is mostly a bugfix release, and is compatible with 1.0 repositories (after config file updates). New features include a new API for querying repository info, better self-referential URL handling, and Oracle 9i support. Several significant-sounding bugs were squashed also.

Ed writes: "Net::OAI::Harvester is a new Perl module available from CPAN for easily interacting with data providers that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. It provides an object-oriented client interface to OAI-PMH in the same way that LWP::UserAgent does for HTTP. Net::OAI::Harvester is basically a toolkit which allows you to quickly write programs that retrieve data from OAI-PMH archives without having to get your hands dirty generating HTTP requests, parsing large amounts of XML, and representing lots of data in memory.

If you are interested in contributing at all to the project please express your interest at on the perl4lib list."

mdewsnip writes: "Greenstone v2.40 is now available for download! A big change in this release is the inclusion in the Windows download of the "Greenstone Librarian Interface", a tool for collecting, expanding and building digital libraries. It gives you access to Greenstone's functionality from an easy-to-use 'point and click' interface, and is also available for Unix systems. Other important changes include a new plugin for importing data from perl's DBI interface, a new plugin for parsing records from OAI servers, improvements to MGPP configuration, new Czech, Galician, Japanese and Thai interfaces, and many bug fixes and other improvements."

a little birdie yim'd me that DSpace version 1.1 (inc. docs) is available. From the sf news item: "New features include Advanced Search capability with fielded searching, better Unicode support, improved performance and lots of other good stuff. And bug fixes. Lots of bug fixes."