scholarly journals Uncertainty about the Long-Term: Digital Libraries, Astronomy Data, and Open Source Software

Author(s):  
Peter T. Darch ◽  
Ashley E. Sands
Infolib ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Anna Chulyan ◽  

The article touches upon the importance of long-term digital preservation of Armenian cultural heritage through creation of digital repositories using Open-Source Software in Armenian libraries. The research highlights the advantages of Open-Source Software in context of providing free access to digital materials, as well as its high level of functionality in order to empower libraries with new technologies for more efficient organization and dissemination of information.


Author(s):  
Josiline Phiri Chigwada

A survey on the adoption of open source software in libraries in developing countries was conducted. An online questionnaire was sent to Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) and Special Commonwealth Assistance for Africa (SCAAP) participants for the Advanced Certificate Course in Modern Library Practices and the Lib@web participants of the Management of Electronic Information and Digital Libraries programme at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. The ITEC/SCAAP programme is sponsored by Government of India while the Lib@web programme is sponsored by Flemish Interuniversity Council – Belgian Development Council (VLIR-OUS). The data was collected from 31 librarians who attended these training programmes. The findings revealed that most libraries in developing countries which sent participants to these programmes have adopted open source software. The author recommends that librarians should continue upgrading their skills so that they are conversant with how the various open source software can be used in their institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo ◽  
Jordi Cabot

AbstractThe role of non-coding contributors in Open Source Software (OSS) is poorly understood. Most of current research around OSS development focuses on the coding aspects of the project (e.g., commits, pull requests or code reviews) while ignoring the potential of other types of contributions. Often, due to the assumption that these other contributions are not significant in number and that, in any case, they are handled by the same people that are also part of the “coding team”. This paper aims to investigate whether this is actually the case by analyzing the frequency and diversity of non-coding contributions in OSS development. As a sample of projects for our study we have taken the 100 most popular projects in the ecosystem of NPM, a package manager for JavaScript. Our results validate the importance of dedicated non-coding contributors in OSS and the diversity of OSS communities as, typically, a contributor specializes in a specific subset of roles. We foresee that projects adopting explicit policies to attract and onboard them could see a positive impact in their long-term sustainability providing they also put in place the right governance strategies to facilitate the migration and collaboration among the different roles. As part of this work, we also provide a replicability package to facilitate further quantitative role-based analysis by other researchers.


Author(s):  
A. Mascitelli ◽  
M. Ravanelli ◽  
S. Mattoccia ◽  
C. Berardocco ◽  
A. Mazzoni

Abstract. Indoor mapping is an essential process in several applications such as the visualization of space and its utilization, security and resource planning, emergency planning and location-based alerts and, last but not least, indoor navigation. In this work, a completely free and open-source (FOS) approach to map indoor environments, and to navigate through them, is presented. Our tests were carried out within Sapienza University of Rome public buildings; in detail, Letters and Philosophy faculty and Engineering faculty indoor environments were mapped. To reach this goal, only open source software such as Quantum GIS (QGIS) and open-source platforms like Open Street Map (OSM) and its indoor viewer, Open Level Up (OLU) were adopted. A database of indoor environments of the two faculties, completely compatible with OLU, was created through QGIS. In this way, a public territorial information system of classrooms, offices and laboratories is accessible to everyone who can, hence, add or modify the information, following the principle of crowdsourcing and of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The developed procedure is now standard and its outputs accepted by the OSM community. Hence, the long-term developments of this project are the proposal for the volunteered and cooperative indoor mapping and design of strategic buildings and infrastructures (hospitals, schools, public offices, shopping centers, stations, airports etc.), starting from the available information (indoor layouts) and knowledge acquired through experience of people who normally work inside them and/or visit them frequently. In this context it is possible to state that the development of VGI for internal maps for strategic buildings, infrastructures and denied GNSS environments, not only supports and improves internal and external navigation without interruption, but can also have a significant positive impact on security and emergency management.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josiline Phiri Chigwada

A survey on the adoption of open source software in libraries in developing countries was conducted. An online questionnaire was sent to Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) and Special Commonwealth Assistance for Africa (SCAAP) participants for the Advanced Certificate Course in Modern Library Practices and the Lib@web participants of the Management of Electronic Information and Digital Libraries programme at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. The ITEC/SCAAP programme is sponsored by Government of India while the Lib@web programme is sponsored by Flemish Interuniversity Council – Belgian Development Council (VLIR-OUS). The data was collected from 31 librarians who attended these training programmes. The findings revealed that most libraries in developing countries which sent participants to these programmes have adopted open source software. The author recommends that librarians should continue upgrading their skills so that they are conversant with how the various open source software can be used in their institutions.


Author(s):  
Abdulkadir Seker ◽  
Banu Diri ◽  
Halil Arslan ◽  
Mehmet Fatih Amasyalı

GitHub is the most common code hosting and repository service for open-source software (OSS) projects. Thanks to the great variety of features, researchers benefit from GitHub to solve a wide range of OSS development challenges. In this context, the authors thought that was important to conduct a literature review on studies that used GitHub data. To reach these studies, they conducted this literature review based on a GitHub dataset source study instead of a keyword-based search in digital libraries. Since GHTorrent is the most widely known GitHub dataset according to the literature, they considered the studies that cite this dataset for the systematic literature review. In this study, they reviewed the selected 172 studies according to some criteria that used the dataset as a data source. They classified them within the scope of OSS development challenges thanks to the information they extract from the metadata of studies. They put forward some issues about the dataset and they offered the focused and attention-grabbing fields and open challenges that we encourage the researchers to study on them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 500-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzad Nejatimoharrami ◽  
Andres Faina ◽  
Kasper Stoy

We introduce a robot developed to perform feedback-based experiments, such as droplet experiments, a common type of experiments in artificial chemical life research. These experiments are particularly well suited for automation because they often stretch over long periods of time, possibly hours, and often require that the human takes action in response to observed events such as changes in droplet size, count, shape, or clustering or declustering of multiple droplets. Our robot is designed to monitor long-term experiments and, based on the feedback from the experiment, interact with it. The combination of precise automation, accurately collected experiment data, and integrated analysis and modeling software makes real-time interaction with the experiment feasible, as opposed to traditional offline processing of experiments. Last but not least, we believe the low cost of our platform can promote artificial life research. Furthermore, prevalently, findings from an experiment will inspire redesign for novel experiments. In addition, the robot’s open-source software enables easy modification of experiments. We will cover two case studies for application of our robot in feedback-based experiments and demonstrate how our robot can not only automate these experiments, collect data, and interact with the experiments intelligently but also enable chemists to perform formerly infeasible experiments.


Author(s):  
C. Green ◽  
V. Rautenbach

Abstract. Many open source software communities rely on volunteer contributors and it is important to motivate, engage and retain members of the community to ensure long term sustainability of the community and software. Barrier to entry can be a problem for new developers and can stop them from contributing to large projects. It is important to mentor and guide new volunteers in an open source project and organisation such as OSGeo. The question is then raised how can open source organizations bridge this gap and bring younger developers into the organizations and ensure that they remain, in order to contribute something meaningful? OSGeo participated for a third time in Google Code-in (GCI). Google Code-in is an online competition that introduces teenagers (13–17 years) to open source development over the course of seven weeks. In the 2019 Google Code-in, there were 29 participating open source organisations, over 3000 students from more than 75 countries that completed 13 000+ tasks. During GCI, OSGeo had the lowest number of mentors in its three years of the competition but its highest number of completed tasks. Many of the submissions from the students was of a high standard and some of the task submissions got accepted into the projects. Having new developers in any open source community is key to the survival of the community and retaining them is also key to the longevity of any of the projects and it gives them time to contribute something meaningful.


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