Here is a picture from the excellent talk by professor Hazel Hall, in which she outlined the informative results of her research.

Update… The talk went well. It was wonderful to see how many delegates were interested in free software. I have been giving free software advocacy presentations for many years, and I always ask for people to give a show of hands. I want to know how many people have heard of free software and how many people use it. Five years ago there was usually a tiny proportion of FOSS users, and I am really pleased to see that now the majority of people in our audience seem to use some free software.

Visit us at Online Information.  We are at Library Coop’s stall (579). 

2012 is also a great time for our co-op to host, because it’ll be the International Year of Co-operatives and our co-op’s tenth anniversary.

So please, if you’d like a library FOSS conference here next year, head over to KohaCon2012 voting straight away. I’ll announce the result after the vote closes on Saturday 1st October.

1. KohaCon11 is being planned for Thane, India. Registrations are open and I’m helping to admin the conference system (OCS). If you’d like to talk, submissions are also open now, although how we review and choose has yet to be decided (should be at the next volunteer meeting). If you’d like to sponsor the event, please register as a potential sponsor.
2. DebConf12′s location will be picked at an IRC meeting today (Tuesday). Bids from Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Managua, Nicaragua are on the web and you are invited to help choose between them.

Are there any other Free and Open Source Software community conferences you’d like to mention?

1. When publishing bibliographic data make an explicit and robust license statement.
2. Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.
3. If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Definition (http://opendefinition.org) – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.
4. Where possible, explicitly place bibliographic data in the Public Domain via PDDL or CC0.

Happily, our co-op has decided to support these principles. I feel that the third one is particularly important: non-commercial clauses lock out many cooperatives and social enterprises from sharing and helping.

If you’ve got an idea for an app using open bibliographic data (you can enter the idea or a prototype app), you’ve just about got time to enter the OpenBiblio Challenge before it closes on 17 February and win some money. Good luck!

But until then, you can look at the wonderful direct blog action by Lars Wirzenius – In defense of Nicole and others after this shocking episode. I hope Lars is wrong in this case and the Davids will join together in their common interest to overthrow the Goliath.

There is a far longer prelude than Lars describes, going back to the April 2005 launch of Liblime (announcement here). An independently-authored history of Koha and LibLime and the recent problems can be found at LWN.net (US$7/month if you woud like to subscribe and support LWN).

Actually, I’m not sure if PTFS is even a Goliath. They seem to stomp around a lot, but how big are they? Biggest credible guess I’ve seen is 125 people across all products (not only Koha), which is fewer than the 150ish Koha-Community developers (not all supporters). So there you have it: Koha is bigger than PTFS. Literally.

“KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.

KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.

The conference is split into 2 parts.

The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.

The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.

For more information see our website

KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.

Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.

If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.

Registration is quick and easy via the website.

We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!”

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?

People have quickly pointed out that the library pub is quite small (a few hundred books) and couldn’t run without the support of the council library service (according to FranksCasket and msarahwickham), so it’s not an obvious cost-cutter. I guess the most endangered are the mobile libraries, as the books could be delivered on request by parcel or courier services without skilled staff. North Somerset has already consulted on cutting the number of stops (the results will be published by 06 Sep 2010) so that might be happen anyway.

The reply which made me smile the most was “Have a better plan: put a pub in the library” which, of course, the visionaries in Norwich have already done. Well, a cafe-bar in the same building as the Millennium Library, at least. Not quite Real Ale, but it’s a start.

Personally, I feel library IT should be in line for cuts before library branches (I really don’t enjoy using the local council library catalogue and the Windows-based PC kiosk control system feels like an expensive nasty experience to me), but it’s all connected. More flexible library IT like Koha, with its web-based user interfaces, common hardware and possibility of distributed cooperative support, could probably support microbranches better than some of the legacy systems.

On 12 May 2009, the European Commission Recommended privacy and data protection in all RFID applications. That was followed by EU Mandate M436 for the European Standards Organisations (ESO) to develop standards to support that recommandation. Phase 1 started last March and has delivered a document RFID-DTR07044v006-draft (PDF). Phase 2 will build on that to produce formal standards for signage, privacy impact assessments and so on.

EDItEUR are replying to that draft on behalf of the library sector and have sent me their draft response RFID_LibrarySectorCommentsDTR-07044-1 as a PDF.

It’s worth opening those two side-by-side to read through. If you can help improve the combined response, please send feedback to the email address in the Library Sector PDF by 6 September. If you’d like to make your own response, you have until 15 September to reply to the ESO PDF using their template.

By the way, does the ESO PDF look jaggy to anyone else? It looks like ghostscript can’t anti-alias the text.

Even so, it wasn’t an easy decision to join. I still believe that RFID standards development would be better done in an open forum, but there doesn’t seem to be a perfect choice and I don’t think we can create one. BIC already has cross-sector support and seems much more open than the so-called “RFID Alliance”. Pragmatism was enough, this time, and so far BIC seems friendly and welcoming. I see that a larger service provider co-operative, OCLC (UK), is also a member, so hopefully that means it’s safe for co-ops.

I think most of the readers of this will be free software developers, koha users and/or members of other co-ops. So, I ask you, what do you think of this move? Leave me a comment on our blog – or email me if you prefer to keep it private.