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LITA Open Source Systems Interest Group
Midwinter 2005 (Boston): Minutes

Chair: Kyle Fenton
Vice Chair: Gwendolyn Reece
14 people in attendance.

Minutes by: Gwendolyn Reece

Program Updates:

1. Shibboleth Pre-Conference: Kyle gave an update on the pre-conference and passed out the draft agenda for the session. We have a commitment from Internet 2 to do the pre-conference and a session at annual. We have co-sponsorship from ACTLS electronic resources interest group, LITA’s security interest group, and LITA’s Emerging Technologies interest group. We may need some help with the logistics when it gets closer to time. Kyle will send out a call for help, if needed.
2. The introductory session on Shibboleth will include a librarian’s panel and vendors.
3. For an additional program, Greenstone has offered to give a session. Kyle distributed an email from Greenstone. This would replace the planned Yochai Benkler session since he will not be attending.
4. LITA National Forum: Internet 2 is interested in doing a more technical pre-conference. Should we try to set that up? a. Discussion from the Floor:
   
   1. It will be challenging to do a one-day session with enough technical information to prepare someone to install shibboleth without it being uninteresting.
   2. This would be a good opportunity for us to contribute to the development of the product since collaboration in the creation of products is one of our ultimate goals.
   3. Should we be trying to bring in higher level administrator types, and is LITA national forum the place to do that?
   4. If we are asking people to pay for two pre-conferences, they need to be sufficiently different that we can justify people paying for them twice.

News:

1. LITA has a new logo
2. LITA is working on a content management system for its website. Each committee and interest group needs to have a couple people trained on it.
3. Everyone is encouraged to go to the Town Hall Meeting.
4. ITAL (the LITA newsletter) is always looking for articles.

Call for Upcoming Co-chair
As reminder, we voted at our last meeting to change our rotation schedule to better facilitate the program planning process. We will need to elect the new vice-chair / chair-elect person in the summer. This will give the vice-chair until the following Midwinter (2006) to come up with preliminary program plans to be presented to the Program Planning Committee at Annual 2006. Everyone is encouraged to consider running.

Meeting Time The President’s address at annual will conflict with our usual meeting time, forcing us to change. We prefer not to be in conflict with programming and need to not compete with Top Tech Trends. Also, we want to change our meeting time to an hour and a half.

Mission Statement We voted to adopt a new mission statement, based on a draft from Gwendolyn with revisions from the floor. The draft was derived from a brainstorming session with OSSIG at Midwinter in San Diego.

The new mission statement is:
To encourage libraries active participation in the Open Source community through developing, adapting, improving, and fixing Open Source solutions for use in libraries. To promote the use of Open Source in libraries through education, distribution, and creating support structures to assist with appropriate implementation. To advocate for the development of appropriate standards and policies that are true to the spirit of the Open Source movement. To advance the recognition within LITA that Open Source is a priority in library information technology.

Possible Program Topics for Annual 2006
In alignment with our new schedule, Gwendolyn Reece (Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect) brought potential ideas to the group for feedback. The feedback provided will enable her to spend the time between Midwinter and Annual developing program proposals to present to the Program Planning Committee at Annual.

She presented seven ideas. The three for which there was the most interest were:

1. DSpace and Institutional Repositories. Even though there will be a program on this at the National Forum, it may be a good program to see if we could co-sponsor with LAMA.
2. Why should a reference librarian care about open source? This had a lot of potential interest. We could look at a suite or projects.
   1. Firefox
   2. ZNote
   3. COPPUL
   4. Reference Desk Manager
   5. Research Guides (for managing subject guides)
   6. Scout Portal Toolkit (also for managing subject guides and allowing comments)
   7. Askal (virtual reference)
   8. Jabber (XML messaging)
3. Open Source Federated Search Engines
   1. If there is sufficient development, maybe have Gwen and/or Keystone DLS.

Other ideas if the ones above do not work out:

1. Open Source Course Management Software (such as Moodle, ILIAS)
2. Library Intranets
3. Project Management Tools (such as Open Workbench – maybe co-sponsor with LAMA)
4. Process Improvement (Look at programs from non-library work world and see how they might be used in a library setting – inventory modules, room scheduling, staff scheduling)