Open Source Software
"Library is a growing organism." The fifth law of Ranganathan's "Five law of library science" has proved itself an undebatable fact from 1930s to now. Library is growing not only in perspective of its collection or size but also its services and tools or equipments used to provide services to users. Within last 20 years we have moved from Closed Access of Open Access, Card or other manual catalogue ot OPAC and Web OPAC, Print Journals to Ejournals, Books to Ebooks, Manual Functioning of library to Automation of library. In every perspective we are dynemically changing. But the only thing which is not changing is financial divide between libraries. In fact it is spread over society, country and world. This divide in this technological age known as digital divide, it we talk in technical perspectives. But it is nothing but financial divide only. Then and now, there are many libraries that can not provide appropriate services to the user or are not able to use technologies for their libraries due to lack of funds in their budget. But today a great movement known as Open Source has removed all bariers to reach the tehnologies. There are many organization which are in process of developing open soure software for any type of use. Today we can find any type of software i.e. an operating system to Open Office, without paying any charge. In the same way for library and information centres there are several softwars are availiable as open source software.
Wikipedia defines OSS as a computer software that is available in source code form for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software. Though there are a number of software are available but here we are concerned with OSS related to Library and Information Centres.
1. Open Source Library Management Software
2. Open Source Digital Library Softwares
- DSpace
- Eprints
- Greenstone