Library Labs Wiki promotes Open Source
The National Library of Australia Library Labs has recently launched a Wiki to keep folks up to date with, and engaged with their developments.
Ever since I came across, what I call their kitchen sink demonstration OPAC (they have put practically everything except the kitchen sink, in to related information around the results) I have been impressed with what they are up to.
The Wiki, has an Our Prototypes page upon which can be found links to, and descriptions of, three prototype interfaces: The NBD Prototype - the official name for demonstrator I mentioned; The Beta Catalogue - a VuFind fronted re-engineering of the National Library’s catalogue; The Single Business Prototype - a proof of concept for providing a single discovery interface to all the library’s current and future discovery services. The page also gives a heads up that a Newspaper Search and Delivery Service is on its way.
The home page of the Wiki proclaims:
We are particularly interested in forming a community of Australian business analysts and developers who are working on similar problems and who are interested in interoperable, standards-based solutions that can foster the development of a national information infrastructure. We are also interested in working with colleagues at an international level to provide prototypes and testbeds for new and emerging standards.
An also:
At the National Library of Australia we have started to redevelop our digital library services using a service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions where these are functional and robust.
Putting these two together it is good to see the promotion of open standards and open software both within and outside of Australia.
This picks up on the themes from last month’s Code4lib 2008 conference, as described by Rob. It is time we all started to cooperate around the innovative work going on globally.
