Post on 20-Nov-2014
description
Did someone say “Free Beer”?!
Dave Pattern, Library Systems ManagerUniversity of Huddersfield
d.c.pattern@hud.ac.uk
Preamble• Presentation available at:
– www.slideshare.net/daveyp/• Please remix and reuse this
presentation– creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0
• Have you remembered to switch your phone on?– please feel free take photos, record audio,
blog, tweet (@daveyp), etc
Contents• Free beer, free kittens and free
speech• Freeconomics• Open Source and Me• Open Source in Libraries• Web Services and APIs• Usage Data -> Open Data
free beer
www.flickr.com/photos/chiefmoamba/59994463/
www.flickr.com/photos/42934556@N00/245866252/
www.flickr.com/photos/timusan/803492184/
Free beer• Open Source software is usually free
to download
free kittensWarning:
the following slides contain images of a highly cute nature
www.flickr.com/photos/clevergrrl/218312595/
www.flickr.com/photos/purplemattfish/3163793691/
www.flickr.com/photos/merlijnhoek/2841785343/
www.flickr.com/photos/merlijnhoek/2789604490/
www.flickr.com/photos/artolog/2473548737/
www.flickr.com/photos/geoftheref/3227445097/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/onefromrome/526057954/
www.flickr.com/photos/alasam/2463625340/
Free kittens• It might be free to download, but there’s
no such thing as a “free lunch” ;-)– p.s. thanks to PTFS for the free lunch
• You’ll need hardware to run the Open Source software on
• You’ll need to spend time maintaining it, supporting it, upgrading it, developing it, etc
• You’ll need to bribe the IT Dept with cakes
free speech
www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/384398069/
www.flickr.com/photos/ifovea/3500343296/
www.flickr.com/photos/squishy/2955317957/
Free speech• “Free software is a matter of liberty,
not price…– freedom to run the software for any
purpose– freedom to study how the software
works, and adapt it to your needs– freedom to redistribute copies– freedom to improve the software, and to
release your improvements, so that the whole community benefits”
www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
freeconomics
A Tale of 2 (Capa)citiesIBM Deskstar• June 2000• £125• 20GB
£6.25 per GB£6,250 per TB
Hitachi Deskstar• July 2008• £95• 1000GB (1TB)
10p per GB£95 per TB
A Tale of 3 (Capa)citiesIBM Deskstar• June 2000• £125• 20GB
£6.25 per GB£6,250 per TB
Seagate Barracuda
• June 2009• £97.50• 1500GB (1.5TB)
6½p per GB£65 per TB
Hitachi Deskstar• July 2008• £95• 1000GB (1TB)
10p per GB£95 per TB
What will the price per GB/TB be next year? How about in 5 years?
Can you spot the trend? ;-)
0
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
5,000
6,000
7,000
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
pric
e pe
r TB
(£)
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
“In the future, [Anderson] argues, when we talk of the ‘money economy’ we will talk of the ‘reputation economy’ and the ‘time economy’ in the same breath.”
Open Sourceand Me
Software that I use regularly…
• Perl (GNU General Public License)• Firefox (GNU General Public License)• MySQL (GNU General Public License)• Apache (Apache Licence)
– mod_perl– Lucene– Solr
http://www.cpan.org/
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/Business-ISBN
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/MARC-Record
Open Sourcein Libraries
Next Gen Catalogues• VuFind• Scriblio (formerly WPopac)• Project Blacklight• eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project• fac-back-opac• The Social OPAC 2.0
More “free” software• ERMes
Electronic Resource Management (ERM) Software– University of Wisconsin-La Crosse– “free”, but requires Microsoft Access
• Meeting Room Booking System– GNU GPL
• MarcEdit– not Open Source, but free to
download/use
Web Servicesand APIs
What can you get for free?• LibraryThing
– thingISBN, a million book covers, thingTitle• Talis
– Talis Platform• OCLC
– xISBN and xISSN (limit on the # of requests)
• Amazon– Amazon Associates Web Service
Usage Data
Keyword cloud
Keyword suggestions (2)
Borrowing suggestions
Personalised suggestions
E-journal data (alpha)
Keyword cloud
Average number of clicks per month
Borrowing profile
Average book loans per month (2002-2008)
Borrowing suggestions
Average number of clicks per month
Borrowing range profile
Number of unique titles (bib#) borrowed per calendar year
recommendation features added to OPAC at start of 2006
Books per active borrower
Average number of books borrowed per active borrower per calendar year
Open Data…or “if you love something, set it free”
Linked data• “There are data in every aspect of our lives,
every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. You get this really huge power out of it. So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this.”
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TED Conference, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/bxua4r
Copyleft• “Copyleft is a play on the word
copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.”– Creative Commons– GNU General Public License
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
No strings attached• CC0
– “…a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible, worldwide”
• Open Data Commons– “…a philosophy and practice requiring
that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control”
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0http://www.opendatacommons.org
Huddersfield’s data release• Prompted by the JISC Tile Project• http://library.hud.ac.uk/usagedata/
– aggregated data for 2 million circulation transactions, covering around 80,000 titles
– recommendation data for over 37,000 titles
– simple XML format– Open Data Commons / CC0 licence
Usage data release• Released on 12th Dec
– converted to RDF by Patrick Murray-John at University of Mary Washington 2 days later!
– Talis podcast at http://bit.ly/z6yjF
What next?• What other usage data is out there?
– reading lists– OpenURL resolvers
• What are the barriers to releasing/sharing data…– technical, logistical, moral, political,
institutional, privacy …?
What next?• What are the benefits…
– better business intelligence for librarians– creation of innovative new services– enrichment of existing services– end-user empowerment &
personalisation …?• JISC Mosaic Project
- watch this space!
Thank you!
www.slideshare.net/daveyp/www.daveyp.com/blog/