Free Puppies, by Flickr user calamity_hane
This Monday, 1:30-3:30 at WCC-146B, I am participating in yet another Ultimate Debate: “Open Source Software – Free Beer or Free Puppy?” The event features Marshall Breeding and Stephen Abram, and will be moderated by Roy Tennant. It has a hashtag of #ultdebate, and even John Berry will be there.
(Sidebar: Berry, how is it that four years is “enough” for our debate when you’ve been writing that column for hmmmm… how long? But no matter…)
The debate has the potential to be really dull or unusually interesting. When I was invited to this event, I was just transitioning from spending a little over a year in a development and support company for open source software toward my new role as university librarian, and Stephen Abram would soon be leaving his high-profile job at Sirsi-Dynix for a position at Gale.
I suspect some people expect me to renounce open source (get thee away, open code!), and others expect me to doggedly embrace it no matter what, like those annoying Apple cultics who would devour arsenic if it arrived in a rounded white plastic container with that familiar fruit emblazoned on its bottlecap.
At MPOW, I’ve been very busy with urgent priorities, from repairing bathroom exhaust fans and tearing out unneeded shelving to rebuilding relations with campus departments and on to creating Team MPOW — a 100% tech-literate, forward-thinking, entrepreneurial squad of library miracle workers.
My library management system… well, it works, which means I can stay focused on other stuff, and its contract is really, really long. That doesn’t mean we have no other choices–there’s always a buy-out, or even a walk-away option–but I am frying all those other fish. (The issues with long ILS contracts I will save for another post someday.)
To me it boils down to who we are as a profession–not just now, but historically. I think companies that produce proprietary library software assume that libraries such as mine wouldn’t benefit from open source software because we would never be able to use OSS without paying for support services and we’d be very unlikely to engage with the development community to any great extent. But I think that’s like assuming that people who don’t use libraries don’t benefit from library service. We, LibraryLand, benefit from our hive mind, particularly in such a sharing profession.
The fundamental problem with the proprietary software model is not one of evil ownership or grasping vendors. I’ve seen both of those occur in the open source software community. The problem with proprietary library management software–from a high-level perspective, profession-wide–is that it makes us stupid. It deprofessionalizes who we are and disengages us from tool creation.
Conversely, every librarian who engages in tool creation to any degree improves the state of librarianship for all of us. This has been true since some guy in a toga put holes in a wall to store the papyrus, and it was true in the 19th century when we agreed as a profession on the size of catalog cards (which led to our early adoption of standards and network-level records), and it is true in the open source community today.
If you think that’s not the case, compare the discussion lists for proprietary products with open source products. I do that every day. For Evergreen, I observe librarians from all roles in their organizations thinking out loud about the tools they are building. For My Home Product, enquiries are limited to simple how-tos. I’m aware there’s a mindset that librarians don’t have the skills to engage with their tools–but I think we have created these librarians. Take someone who is fresh out of library school, put a brick wall between their tools and their services, and decades later you will have someone who has lost the ability to think in terms of tool creation. Invention of any kind is a muscular activity, one that requires constant use in order not to atrophy.
One viable question is whether any of this matters. The debate on open source will probably focus on the integrated library systems most of us use. I mean no disrespect to library development companies of any type, but the local “book catalog” is a dwindling focus of our services (and the architecture of all current LMS’s, regardless of the openness of their code, is built around 20th-century workflows). Our e-services are key.
Some of you may say that projects such as OLE will replace the ILS. But I question how we can truly design new workflows when we have no insight into (and very little role in) the evolution of digital content in the next decade.
Nevertheless, most of us continue to have traditional print collections and most of us need to move that stuff around–catalog it, check it in, check it out, etc. Furthermore, engagement with library management software–even at a distance–keeps those invention muscles buffed and toned. It is a logical focus of our attention.
If librarianship will survive the Big Shift, it will do so by reinventing itself. To reinvent itself will require many muscles of invention. And that, in the end, is why we need open source.
Posted on this day, other years:
- My ALA 2011 Annual Schedule - 2011
- See me in Anaheim at Booth 1888 (and elsewhere!) - 2008
- Hi Ho, Hi Ho, to ALA I Go - 2006
- The Classics Meme - 2004
[…] Schneider has been Thinking about Open Source. This is a good thing, as she tends to do a great job exploring the interrelationships between […]
“This has been true since some guy in a toga put holes in a wall to store the papyrus”
Well, not to get pedantic (something someone always says right before getting pedantic…), but the toga was a very specific Roman robe, made of a single cloth and worn by Senators and patricians. The bibliophylaxes of Alexandria predated the rise of Rome and were of Greek descent – tunics and robes, perhaps, but never togas!
Sorry. Sometimes the Roman history major in me peaks out. I like to look both forwards and backwards ;).
Oops. 🙂 But they drank brandy Alexanders, right? (Clearly I am a little weak on history…)
An excellent blog entry. It’s not a matter of big, bad corporations–it’s a matter of the products being shaped by the people using them. It’s good for the product, and good for the workers who use them.
Librarians often created their own in-house reference products (“files”), until commercial indices and abstracts took over. The result has been a short shrift in the creation of local information sources–we have been happy to outsource this vital function to third parties, and become database jockies. We should create products in our own field, and widen the amount of information for which we create tools. Opensource is, as you say, really a debate over whether we are dumb consumers or active, professional creators.
In our environment, a private law firm library, open source is not an option. However we work very closely with our ILS provider encouraging them to develop the product the way we want it to work. We have partnered with them on new modules and gotten them to work with third party vendors when they needed extra resources.
For example we have an e-journal management system that checks in electronic newsletters harvested from a mailbox, attaches the latest copy to the bib record for preview inthe OPAC, and mails itself to the routing list.
Also the library director and I are on the Advisory Board for the vendor. They hold regular meetings with us and even preview products and new developments and solicit our recommendations. The vendor seems to respect our opinions and we feel that we are getting a product that works for us in our environment, so we do feel that we are contributing to the creative process and not just accepting the product as is.