NewsForge: Quiet Revolution: Librarians Teach and Preach Open Source Software at Convention

“Fresh from a victory against Internet filtering, many
librarians are celebrating and demonstrating Free Software that can
automate a public library for under $1,000, organize information
into Web portals, and manipulate data in arcane formats.

“Librarians have always understood the value of sharing
information. The hacker librarians in Atlanta for the American
Library Association’s annual convention, which continues through
Tuesday, have been living out their creed by developing freely
distributable software and teaching others how to use it. Their
peers — human search engines at the public library, scholarly
bibliographers in academia, and the rarefied ranks of competitive
intelligence researchers — have arrived by the busload for
sessions on Linux, BSD, and Open Source tools.

“The host of Friday’s hands-on tutorial, Emory University
Library’s Martin Halbert, says he encourages his staff to look
first for Open Source software because ‘it’s philosophically
aligned with the values of academia.’ And it doesn’t merely save
the library money; it brings in more money. Grant funding to
develop metaScholar, a toolkit for describing scholarly
information, was contingent upon sharing the results. Halbert said
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation insisted that ‘if you want one of
these grants, you’d better do Open Source…'”

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