Karen A. Coombs - Open Source Web Applications For Libraries

Open source software in libraries covers a wide range of applications that one could, in fact, write several books on. This book focuses on one piece of the puzzle: open source web applications and their use in libraries. A web application is a piece of software that is accessed via a web browser over a network (either the internet or an intranet). The majority of the web is made up of these web applications; sites such as Flickr and Gmail can be considered web applications. Libraries have increasingly worked toward deploying web applications to meet the needs of their users and to serve internal work processes. In our work as web librarians, weve witnessed this transition and have been asked to create or deploy an increasing number of web applications, many of which are open source.

As a result, over the course of our careers, we have encountered and used a variety of open source web applications in order to meet the changing needs of libraries. Sometimes weve worked with open source software out of financial necessity, but increasingly weve deliberately chosen to work with open source software. We prefer open source software because it provides us with more flexible and adaptable technologies to solve whatever problems we are working on.

We found it both serendipitous and ironic that, while we were completing this book, the transition of the whitehouse.gov site to Drupal (an open source content management system) was in the news. This announcement is just one of many indicators that open source software has become increasingly mainstream. Significant portions of the internet have open source components. Companies such as Google and Sony use open source infrastructure, and websites such as PBS Engage (www.pbs.org/engage), the Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org), IHOP (www.ihop.com), the University of Maine (www.umaine.edu), and Best Buys local store blogs (stores.bestbuy.com/577) are powered by open source web applications.

Yet as web librarians weve also discovered a general lack of knowledge among our colleagues about the open source tools available to libraries and a general feeling of fear and uncertainty about open source software. Weve found that libraries and librarians think of open source software as being difficult to install. Additionally, we often hear there isnt any open source thing that does X, even when applications that provide such functionality do exist. It worries us that libraries lack good information when deciding which web tools (proprietary or open source) to implement.

Because of this information gap, we decided that one of our goals for this book would be to dispel some of the misconceptions about open source software in libraries. Most of the applications discussed in this book can be installed in 15 minutes or less. Some of the featured applications can easily be tried out with BitNami installations (www.bitnami.org), even without having access to a server.

Additionally, wed like to shift the focus of open source software in libraries away from open source integrated library systems, such as Koha and Evergreen, to smaller web applications. There are many wonderful projects in this arena that can help libraries fulfill their goals and mission. Well do our best to highlight the best of these web applications available for libraries.

The books content builds in a progressive fashion, from discussing the basicswhat is open source softwareto providing an overview of the current open source NextGen catalog software. Although you are welcome to read the book from cover to cover, it is structured so that you can also choose to read just a particular chapter on a particular application. The first part gives an introduction to open source web applications. provides an overview of hosting options for open source software and will be helpful for libraries trying to decide where to host their software.

The remainder of the book is divided into four broad sections: Blogs and Wikis, Content Management Systems, Reference and Instruction Tools, and Resource Discovery Tools. In the Blogs and Wikis section, we discuss two blogging tools and two wiki applications. In , the last chapter in this section, focuses on MediaWiki, the open source wiki tool that powers Wikipedia.