oss4lib

As seen at Rubyforge: Blacklight is "a next generation library catalog written in ruby, using solr as the underlying search engine. All you have to do is export your marc records, index them with the scripts provided, start up ruby on rails, and you're on your way to faceted browsing bliss."

Links to a demo, docs, and the project list are all available at blacklight.rubyforge.org.

As seen on drupal.org: "This module provides a way to map data in the MARC record to Drupal content types and import sets of MARC records. The module currently supports mapping to the default node fields, taxonomy fields and CCK text fields... By importing a library's MARC records directly in to Drupal as nodes, you can easily recreate your library's catalog in a rich social environment."

Very cool to see something like this pop up into another popular CMS (Scriblio being the prior example).

A copy of the latest release is attached.

RefDB has changed a lot since the last mention of it here. From the latest release news on fm:

"The PHP Web interface supports live links for keywords, authors, and periodicals which are displayed as "tag clouds". Automatic format detection from local files is done, and has a type-sensitive form for editing data. RefDB implements all SRU operations (explain, searchRetrieve, scan) with MODS output, and conforms to CQL Level 2. Namespaced XML output allows processing of schema-based TEI P5 and DocBook V.5.0 documents. Raw bibliographies were added. Searching for and styling of less-common fields was improved."

The source, perl client, and sru support code are attached.

From the open-ils blog:

"Evergreen 1.2 is the first Evergreen release that has received substantial contributions (patches, documentation, feedback, suggestions, testing, etc.) from folks affiliated with neither the Georgia Public Library Service nor Equinox Software... So as a milestone, 1.2 is really significant because it is truly a community release."

According to the feature list for 1.2.0:

"This release adds functionality, performance, and usability improvements, and simplifies installing and configuring..."

The latest source tarballs of Evergreen-ILS and the related/required OpenSRF toolkit are attached.

Free in this month's Computers in Libraries (I get paid to write a column in same, but had no idea about this until now) is this piece by Mike Beccaria and Dan Scott:

"Fac-Back-OPAC is a faceted back­ up OPAC. This advanced catalog offers features that compare favorably with the traditional catalogs for today’s library systems. Fac-Back-OPAC represents the convergence of two prominent trends in library tools: the decoupling of discovery tools from the traditional integrated library system and the use of readily available open source components to rapidly produce leading-edge technology for meeting patron and library needs. Built on code that was originally developed by Casey Durfee in February 2007, Fac-Back-OPAC is available for no cost under an open source license to any library that wants to offer an advanced search interface or a backup catalog for its patrons."

Scriblio is a WordPress-based OPAC and CMS, which merges the concepts of "blog entry" and "catalog record". You can see it in action live at Plymouth State University, the project's host institution.

Read about how to get it here, with some detailed notes about installation here.

Copies of the scriblio-specific (i.e. not-WordPress) components are attached.

The LibraryFind crew has released version 0.8.2, which promises:

• Improved out-of-the-box user interface
• re-worked html/css architecture to support easier design customization
• new generic graphic design for out-of-the-box UI
• many, many bugfixes

Try this latest version out live at OSU.

A copy is attached.

It's been a long while since I've written about Tellico, the excellent personal bibliographic collection manager. But since the last post here, it's undergone a steady series of improvements and remains a terrific desktop app with super all-purpose biblio-fu. The latest version is 1.2.14.

Somehow I couldn't download 1.2.14, so a copy of 1.2.13 is attached.

Hammer writes: "We're delighted to announce the release of another new product: Simple2ZOOM, a sort of universal Swiss Army gateway that proxies between Z39.50, SRU, SRU/POST and SRW. Although nearly all testing so far has been with Z39.50-to-SRU configurations, it ought to work with pretty much any combination of these protocols on the front- and back-ends. The software essentially combines the qualities of two existing packages, ZOOM and SimpleServer into one universal protocol gateway.

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the National Library of Australia for providing funding that enabled us to add lots of the functionality and bring this product up to a releasable standard."

A copy is attached.

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.