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This is old news from February, but I seemed to have missed it: the NRCan (Federal Natural Resources ministry in Canada) libraries have chosen the Open Source Evergreen integrated library system (ILS). Kudos to my colleague George Duimovich and others at the NRCan library . Here is the opening search interface . It is great to see sensible Web 2.0 and Open Source choices can be made in such organizations.

The March 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries is titled " The Open Source Software Craze" and has a series of articles on Open Source in Libraries: Using Open Source to Give Patrons What They Want . Amy Begg De Groff. The Community Behind the Code . Terence K. Huwe. Making a Business Case for Open Source ILS . Marshall Breeding. What Librarians Still Don’t Know About Open Source . Daniel Chudnov. Open Source Becomes More Accessible . Janet L. Balas. What Can Open Source Do for You? Rachel Singer Gordon and Jessamyn West. Unfortunately most of the articles do not seem to be web accessible until later this month.

One of the more interesting things that I learned on my recent trip to Denver was the new feature of Aquabrowser called ' My Experience ' where LibraryThing tags (17M) and ratings (2M) are pre-loaded and made available out-of-the-box. More important is how all instances of My Experience can participate in a global network of other instances, and can share additional social networking information generated by the users' of the instances (and perhaps other sources?). I also have to say that I was very impressed with the presentation of TLC 's Indigo ILS front-end: it was very convincing (and much better than their online flash presentation : they need to fix that!).

Many of the other speakers - mostly vendors - demoed their equivalent to Google's 'Did you mean' with various names, like "Did you want". This led me to refer in my talk to this particular feature as the " Spice Girls' feature ": " Tell me what I want, what I really really want ". :-)

I am in Denver today, giving the afternoon plenary at today's Next Gen Library Interface Conference , put on by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries . I'd like to thank George Machovec , associate director of "the Alliance", for inviting me down. The meeting is a mix of vendor presentations with two plenaries: Morning Keynote: Marshall Breeding , Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University Library Vendor presentation: Encore (III) break Vendor presentation: AquaBrowser Vendor presentation: Primo (Ex Libris) lunch Afternoon Keynote: Glen Newton , Researcher, Information Science, NRC-CISTI, National Research Council Canada: Open source tools and case study . break Vendor presentation: WorldCat Local (OCLC) Vendor presentation: Indigo (TLC) Here is my presentation . PowerPoint created in Open Office. Related post (Marshal Breeding): 2008 Feb 23: Openness in the library (technology) Update March 28: Link to Colorado Alliance of Resear...