I’ll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours
“If only every library had a John.” So said Sarah Houghton-Jan, talking about John Blyberg and the SOPAC features he designed for AADL. (Although it does sort of sound like she’s talking about something else, taken out of context. There are some days I wish my library had 4 or 5 johns. But no one consulted me when the building was being designed.)
Wouldn’t that be swell? I would love to have a John Blyberg at MPOW. But my library doesn’t have someone like him right now, and I don’t see us getting someone like that anytime soon. And what about those smaller libraries, with a staff of one? How are they supposed to get someone with John’s imagination and mad coding skillz?
John has made the source code for the SOPAC available, and I think this is really the most significant aspect of the AADL SOPAC. (Richard Wallis of Talis seems to agree.) Because not every library can have a John Blyberg, and every library shouldn’t have to hire a John Blyberg to get access to innovations like this. And we shouldn’t have to sit around and wait for ILS vendors to start releasing these kinds of innovations for free. Are we not librarians? Are we not all about the free flow of information? John giving out his source code for free shouldn’t be remarkable, because we librarians should be doing this all the time, as a matter of course. Isn’t sharing information and innovation the most cost-effective way of improving our systems and services? What do we have to lose?
January 24th, 2007 at 10:22 am
You just made me laugh out loud!!!!!
January 24th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
True. But those of us without Johns (heh) would still need a “mini-John” to implement this stuff. I mean, my library has III, but I’m not really up to installing Drupal, downloading John’s tarball, and setting up something that the man himself says “will definitely not work out-of-the-box.”
Still, cool stuff as usual from John, and a worthwhile challenge to the rest of us to figure out how we are going to take advantage of all this coolness.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Right, Steve. Which is why I think that as significant as John’s action is, Libraryland needs more of it. More sharing, more open source, more “out of the box” tools that people can easily set up. Maybe it seems like pie in the sky, but it doesn’t have to be.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Oh, and I’m glad I could make you laugh, Jennifer. Any day I can make at least one person laugh is a good day.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I am actually considering letting people [students, non-john librarians] play around with an installation of Joomla I have running on a server.
Maybe Drupal oughta go that way too.
Librarians and library students need time to play with this sort of stuff.
January 24th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Librarians and library students need time to play with this sort of stuff.
Hell yes! Not only do we need solo playtime (paid, natch!), we need to have play dates, when we get together and share our toys with each other.