(933)LIBRARY A LA CARTE: OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR LIBRARYRESEARCH GUIDES

摘要

The core mission of university libraries is to provide access to books, journals, data and primarysources to enhance and enable research and education. Because students are accustomed togathering information using commercial search engines, they can overlook high-quality libraryresources. To connect with student researchers when they need library resources, many libraries havebuilt online research guides tied to specific subjects and courses. These guides can address specificassignments where research is required, and course instructors can point students to the guides toassist them in completing their research assignments successfully. In 2006, Oregon State University(OSU) Libraries developed an open source software product called Library a la Carte that librarianscan use to construct research guides easily and quickly. The code was made available to otherlibraries, and a number of institutions have adopted the tool. A successful user community has grownup around Library a la Carte, but development up to this point has been the sole responsibility of OSULibraries. We are now embarking on building a robust developer community, to contribute code, tobuild additional features and to take Library a la Carte into the future. As part of our plan to moveforward, we are testing a hosted (cloud-based) version of the software. This paper introduces Library ala Carte, presents what was learned from the test and discusses moving forward with building adeveloper community. In addition, we touch on the benefits and challenges of building and sustainingan open source product from the ground up.