NSR writes: "The koha project has elected a new coordinator, Pat Eyler, and is in the process of building a new, feature rich version of its library catalog and intranet suite. More good news (and features) expected shortly!" Congrats Pat! Be sure to have a look at the meeting notes and irc log and more backstory, props, and a def'n of kaitiaki for a fascinating look at a healthy open source process.

from their about page: "Bookshare.org dramatically increases access to books for the community of visually impaired and otherwise print disabled individuals. This online community enables book scans to be shared, thereby leveraging the collections of thousands of individuals who regularly scan books, eliminating significant duplication of effort. Bookshare.org takes advantage of a special exemption in the U.S. copyright law that permits the reproduction of publications into specialized formats for the disabled." Congrats to Alison et al, who've been working to make this real for some time now... and see what you can do to help! Maybe your library can help with scanning, or sponsor an organizational membership.

brent simpson writes: "OpenSourceSchools.org is a new website dedicated to fostering the adoption and successful use of free and open source solutions in education.

We have organized the site into informational categories. Our idea is to use the roles of those in the school community as a lens through which to view how free and open source software and content can serve a school. That is, instead of starting with categories such as operating systems and applications, or books and videos, we end with them. We start by asking questions such as these:

Eric writes: "To subscribe to the new Prospero email discussion list go to : auto.med.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/prospero. A Web archive is also available at auto.med.ohio-state.edu/pipermail/prospero." Judging by the traffic already on the list it looks like this will be even more useful than the webboard.

as reported by lwn.net, see the LinuxFund site and the Leviathan Project proposal. An excerpt: "I am proposing creating a complete library system for all library transactions. It will be created with three tiers. The base tier will be a SQL RDMS system. The SQL code will be GPL and follow the SQL '92 Standard. This allows the Library implementation to use "free", Postgresql or GNU SQL, or commercial, Oracle or DB2 or etc., for the database backend. This gives the library or company implementing the solution to choose a "best" setup for the specific library system. The database will be based upon the current MARC Standard. It will include all currently recognized item types and be expandable, as new item types become available." LinuxFund has awarded $1000 to this project effort. Congrats to Donald, and to LinuxFund for choosing this and several other deserving efforts. Good luck! Hopefully you'll find some time savings by working with some of the projects listed here...

In case you missed it, from the W3C Weekly News: "The World Wide Web Consortium today released XML Schema as a W3C Recommendation in three parts: Part 0: Primer, Part 1: Structures, Part 2: Datatypes. The specification is stable and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favors its adoption by academic, industry, and research communities. XML Schemas define shared markup vocabularies, the structure of XML documents which use those vocabularies, and provide hooks to associate semantics with them." For more see the press release or the Primer (which is itself a Recommendation too) for an introduction.

This week's W3C Weekly news packs some big punches: "Canonical XML Becomes a W3C Recommendation, XML Protocol Requirements Working Draft Published, XML Schema Becomes a W3C Proposed Recommendation", and more. All are summarized as news items with lots o' links at w3c.org. All three of these are of particular note; the canonicalization piece is vital, the Protocol bits look to be a meta(replacement?)-standard for XMLRPC/SOAP/Jabber-type environments, and XML Schema is huge. Big doin's indeed.

among other news seen on w3c-announce: "The W3C XML Query Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of XQuery: A Query Language for XML. The XQuery language is designed to be broadly applicable across all types of XML data sources from documents to databases and object repositories." [Also...] "the XForms Working Group has released a new Working Draft of XForms 1.0. The draft describes the architecture, concepts, processing model, and terminology underlying XForms, the next
generation of Web forms." Find out more at w3c.org.

Ben writes: "epixtech announced earlier this month that it "plans to offer Open Source licensing for its software to implement the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP). It's great to see major vendors participating in the Open Source world." Agreed, but let's see the code. :)

Today's the day: the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is posted, and the public forum in D.C. is going on as we speak. Everyone in our community would do well to take a close look at 1.0 and consider the opportunities this new standard provides. Maybe we can get someone attending the meeting to report back, too (hint, hint). More info on the overall project can be found at the Open Archives site. Congrats to Herbert and Carl, et al.!