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COPYRIGHT 2001 Information Today, Inc.
Open source methods of software development have been around at least since Richard Stallman's pioneering efforts with his GNU Project in 1984--a project that developed the free GNU operating system (http://www.gnu.org). Lately, open source technology has gained mainstream notoriety and headlines by way of Napster and its cousins, but savvy systems administrators have been incorporating free software into work and home systems for years.
Not surprisingly, open source methods are increasingly being used in the library environment. Free software is just that, free, so it obviously appeals to limited budgets. But there's much more. There's a passionate collaborative effort that's part of the open source methodology, and a strong community of developers always forms around a new project. Their efforts often yield niche applications that are incredibly flexible.
A major voice behind advocating free software adoption for libraries is oss4lib, a Web site and mailing list devoted to getting the word out about new free projects and software uniquely tailored to library-specific functions. Dan Chudnov, Systems Architect at the Gushing/Whitney. Medical Library at Yale University's School of Medicine, is one of the contributors to the oss4lib project (http:// oss4lib.org) and a strong proponent of free software for libraries. I met with Dan at Yale, and he spoke at length about open source and how library methodologies and philosophies run parallel with the motivations behind the free software movement.
BM: Describe what you do here.
DC: I'm a librarian. I sit at the reference desk; I help put our online resources online. But what I primarily do is system development--my title is Systems Architect. I do system design, development, and programming. When I'm lucky, that means finding the right combination of tools to solve problems we're either starting to have or are going to have down the road.
I spend a lot of time writing software from scratch because sometimes the right tools don't exist. But I spend more time keeping an eye on software that's already out there. So that when we need something to do a new job I know what's best for it. I try a lot of new things out. I'm mostly here to make sure we have the right tools for the right place at the right time.
BM: It sounds like you have a mix of IT and reference responsibilities.
DC: Definitely. Certainly more of an IT position rather than reference position. But I'm a librarian.
BM: So the interest in open source software is sort of a natural function of your position.
DC: It is.
BM: How did you get into open source?
DC: I've always used free software. I've been actively doing software development since I started library school. I saw it could be a good thing with a little investment in time. When I arrived at Yale in 1997, there were some projects we needed to do. I started writing some applications in Visual Basic and writing some proprietary tools for the Netscape Web. server. It reached a point [where] it became very obvious that what we were doing was something other people could use. We had seen others working on the same thing and thought they should have what we were working on. We started to think about selling it. Well, we're just a library...
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