If you're a librarian and you haven't thought through what napster means yet, get thinking. Many folks are perturbed about how easy it is to violate copyright using napster. "Docster: Instant Document Delivery" describes a napster-like system for libraries which builds copyright compliance in from the start.

Dave writes: "There will be a meeting of the newly-formed LITA Open Source Systems Interest Group at Midwinter. It will be Sat 1/15/2000 from 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m. at the Marriott Rivercenter (MARHQ - NOT the Marriot Riverwalk), Conference 4. This Interest Group is chaired by Jeremy Frumkin of the University of Arizona Libraries and vice-chaired by me. The agenda will include final
preparations for the IG's first program at ALA Chicago, discussion of ongoing open source library initiatives and projects, discussion of the IG's goals and objectives, and future programming possibilities. All interested parties are more than welcome to attend."

oss4lib now supports the Rich Site Summary (RSS) format for headline feeds. You can grab our headlines using the url http://www.med.yale.edu/library/oss4lib/oss4lib.rss. enjoy...

anon writes in: "I saw a cool new company that promises to bring open source to the publishing world, specifically the text book world... What do you think?" See openmindpublishing.com for more. A chief rule (as told by ESR) of open source is that you must present a plausible promise of working code; I can't find anything on their site to evaluate so it looks like vapor to me. Give us at least one textbook to review before more press releases...

Jeremy F. sent in a pointer to this piece at oreillynet.com, a transcript of everybody's friend Tim's talk entitled "Open Source: The Model for Collaboration in the Age of the Internet". The talk was delivered at Computers, Freedom and Privacy in Toronto last week. Besides being a good read, anyone who follows all the links in this piece and reads on will be pretty much up-to-date with many major open source goings-on.

as seen at the osdls site: "The Open Source Systems for Libraries Interest Group of LITA held its initial business meeting at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio, Texas, on Jan. 15 from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. 24 people were in attendance..." More info, including how to join the OSSIG listserv, is available here. Great turnout, but I guess Jeremy didn't bring his camera this time... :(

It's true; click on over and check out www.oss4lib.org. Everything should be working ok but let me know if anything seems broken.

Ahhh... :)

slashdot is running this story on the Highwire Press-led LOCKSS project for distributed long-term journal storage. The /. blurb references the months-old Chronicle piece on the topic. The LOCKSS page hasn't changed in a while... hope we see some source code and reports soon.

There is now a place for you to post articles, whitepapers, opinion pieces, etc. related to oss4lib and Open Source projects for libraries. Anyone can post comments on your article, too. Click -articles- above, check it out.

This thread to be used for discussion of said article.