A friend told me about Ellen Lupton’s design books and website.  I immediately requested 6 of her books through the public library. I’m especially excited to read Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself.

The free font manifesto on Lupton’s site caught my eye.  There are some handsome fonts with names like Linux Libertine, Freefont, and Ubuntu.  The manifesto sets out that a free font is has been licensed to be free and can be altered to form a new font (sound familiar?) and has been made available beyond a group of friends or buyers of a software package or operating system.  There is a short discussion on if all fonts should be free.  The manifesto points out that typeface design in a profession and business and that if all fonts were free these people would be out of a job.  The manifesto continues:

Most typefaces created in the free font movement are designed to serve relatively small or underserved linguistic communities. They have an explicit social purpose, and they are intended to offer the world not a luxurious outpouring of typographic variation but rather the basics for maintaining literacy and communication within a society. 

During the final conference block at the 2008 British Columbia Library Association conference in Richmond, a session packed with many intriguing workshops, I had the privilege of convening a talk by Anita Palepu and Dean Giustini, titled Open Medicine: The first year of independent, open-access publishing. The session was cosponsored by the BCLA Intellectual Freedom Committee, BCLA Information Policy Committee, and the Health Library Association of BC.

Many librarians in BC and beyond will be familiar with Giustini’s work, ranging from his Google Scholar Blog to BMJ articles to his teaching activities at Langara and UBC . Dean is also an Associate Editor of Open Medicine, and writes the Open Medicine Blog.

Anita Palepu is one of the editors who left CMAJ over issues of editorial independence, to found Open Medicine. Dr. Palepu is an assistant professor of medicine at UBC and research scientist at CHEOS, focusing her research on urban health.

The presentation touched on the issues of editorial independence in medical journals that led up to the creation of Open Medicine as an editorially independent, “gold” open access, general medical journal, built and published with open source software. Palepu and Giustini tag-teamed their way through a brief history of open access in Canada as well as the steps in establishing an OA journal. A unique feature of the presentation was a highlight on the value a librarian can add to an editorial board, enhancing the journal’s impact.

Looking back on the first year of Open Medicine, the editors certainly have the right be to patting themselves on the back! With a respectable acceptance rate of 20% and reviewing turnaround of about 30 days, the journal published 42 articles (including non-peer review features) in the first year, and has 2893 registered website users. All of this success requires a significant commitment of both time and energy from the all-volunteer editorial board — not only for typical editing and management duties, but also for fundraising to support the journal.

Slides from the session are available on Slideshare.

About 30 people came to our session on open source software at BCLA. Our goal was to have an accessible session for regular human beings. From the front of the room I was able to tell that people (geeks and human beings alike) were engaged and interested. After the session we got some really good feedback from academic, public and special librarians as well as public library trustees and vendors.

Here is our handout (pdf). Here are Catherine Howett’s slides on Zotero and Sage (ppt).

Click here to read the rest of the post.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the OpenOffice suite (Writer, Calc, Base etc.) and the MS Office suite (Word, Excel, Access etc). I’ve been reading reviews and compairsions between the two sets of software. I’ve enlisted geeky friends to help me evaluate both software suites.

The OpenOffice suite is generally comparable to MS Office. Actually I think Writer is better than Word. The consensus on the websites that I’ve read is that Calc is better than Excel for beginner users but Excel is better for the advanced user. My partner, who occasionally sends me complex Excel formulas to gush over, remains skeptical that Calc is anywhere close to her beloved Excel. She’ll phone and blurt out a feature, like “pivot tables” or “vlookup” and ask me if “Calc can do that?”–so far it can.

The one place where I have had difficulties has been moving between Writer and Word.  Writer can open .doc formats (OpenOffice 3.0 available in beta at the end of this month will be able to open Word 2007 .docx files, which older versions of Word can’t do).  It’s also possible to save a document as a .doc file in Writer.  However if I’m working on a Writer document that someone else on my team needs to change I find that some of the formatting is lost when I save the document in Word format.  This wouldn’t be an issue if everyone were using OpenOffice.

So, why aren’t libraries using OpenOffice?  I’m not sure if it’s realistic for libraries to adopt many types of open source software if their funding organizations (for public libraries, the cities or towns that fund them, and for academic libraries the universities or colleges as a whole). I’m not sure why municipalities and universities are not moving to using OpenOffice and other open source software. I imagine that soon many organizations will be paying to upgrade to Word 2007. I’m not sure why libraries are not taking a leadership role in trying to make this change to open source. It would save money in the short and long term.

When European and South American countries have legislated that government bodies must use open standards so there are guarantees that the file format of a document can be accessed in the future.  Why are we still locking into proprietary file formats that may not be readable in the future? When I worked at the Vancouver Public Library there was still a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 kicking around because some of the older spreadsheets from the City were in that format.

I might be missing some of the picture, but I’m not sure what the big hurdle is.  Why can’t this happen?

I was reading Venus Zine and noticed an ad for Burda, the company that makes sewing patterns. The tagline was “open source sewing”. While, it’s a cute concept for a website (that also has sewpedia section), I don’t think it’s correct. I usually describe open source software as software that is free, with the source code being open so that it can be changed and improved. There are several other criteria that something needs to meet to be truly open source.

I’m not an open source purist, but it makes me slightly cranky that Burda is conflating free with open source as part of a hipster advertising campaign. They do, however, have lots of patterns available for free download.

Jeff Davis, Catherine Howett and I will be doing a session on Friday, April 18th at the BCLA conference introducing and demonstrating lots of open source software including:

• Ubuntu (operating system, like Windows)
• Firefox (web browser, like Internet Explorer) and various extensions/plug ins
• Zotero (citation manager, like RefWorks or EndNote)
• Open Office (software suite with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database programs, like MS Office)
• Drupal and/or Wordpress (content management systems, like…actually I can’t think of a proprietary CMS)
• Evergreen (integrated library system, like Horizon, Unicorn or Voyager)

Our goal is to introduce a bunch of things that we use and think are neat in an accessible way. Our secret hope is that people will be excited to try out some of these programs on their own and implement them in their libraries.  I might even sew an “open source” frock to wear.

There’s a fantastic post on the LibraryThing’s blog about the Library of Congress signing a $3 million deal with Microsoft to develop their new website with Microsoft’s Silverlight plug in. The catch is that libraries will need to also have Microsoft hardware and software to access the LoC website.

Casey Durfee writes:

Once you’re locked in to the entire Microsoft stack, you pretty much can’t change a single piece without completely redoing your entire IT operation from top-to-bottom. When the free deal expires or you need new servers, you end up having to buy new Microsoft licenses and software. It’s like giving somebody a kitten for a present — they’ll still be paying for and cleaning up after your gift 10 years from now.

Free as in kitten indeed.

Loosely related story: when I bought my laptop in the Fall I was adamant that I would be getting rid of Vista, even though it would void the warantee on the laptop.  The screenshot software that I like only runs on Windows and OnState Skype runs on Internet Explorer.  So, I’m going to need to learn more about Linux than I thought I would.

*meow*