My VALA Travel Scholar paper: slides

Today I gave my Big Paper, the one I’ve known I’ve had to do since November 2008, the one that enabled me to go on the seven weeks’ overseas Trip of a Lifetime. I think I have lived with it for so long that I had gone beyond being nervous – which I made me feel a bit uncomfortable, because I think that nervous feeling makes me strive harder…

The title: Taking matters into our own hands: influencing factors and concerning factors for libraries that developed their own Open Source Software .

I was planning to Ustream it, but I think the wifi in the conf venue will be flakey. If it is not, try http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kathrynarium around 10:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time.

For the paper, I interviewed managers who supported, and developers who coded:

• Scriblio
• SOPAC2
• Evergreen
• Koha
• VuFind
• Blacklight

These were bold, adventurous folk who went out on a limb and created something for the rest of us. They were the type of people that it was exciting to just be in the same room with.

I also interviewed six librarians who were involved in specifying the Open Library Project.

I wanted to find out three things:
1. Why they developed their Open Source Software?
2. What were the risks?
3. How can what they learned be used by libraries thinking of adopting Open Source Software?

To keep it standardised, I took out of the formal literature a bunch of reasons given for libraries to develop/adopt OSS and another bunch of risks. I then asked my participants whether these reasons claimed to be influential actually were – and whether there were other factors.

I will put up a link to my paper when it becomes available. After VALA has finished I will write a post explaining the 10 things that are valuable for libraries thinking of adopting software. I will be submitting a more detailed version – with more quotes from the interviewees – as my Masters’ Thesis in June this year.

For now, here are my slides from today: