Bibliocycle

Recently I traveled to Holy Cross  in Worcester to attend a NERCOMP program on academic uses of the Word Press publishing platform.   This open-source tool has exciting applications for the academic community in blogging, web content management, manuscript peer review, improvements in library catalogs, and course instructional support.  And because it is open source, those organizations that have adopted it and are using it in creative ways are downright evangelistic about it.  Word Camp provided an opportunity for individuals interested in these uses to meet and talk with the power users.

The speaker line up was really high-powered.  Ken Panko and Yianni Yessios from Yale spoke about how they have used WordPress to implement student-created podcasts, video and images.  In addition, they have created an implementation supporting a virtual paper mill inside Second Life.

Representatives of Wesleyan University spoke of their experience successfully using  WordPress  as a complete course management system, instead of expensive and less flexible products like Blackboard.

Casey Bison, of Plymouth State University, spoke about Scriblio, a WordPress based library catalog and digital archives system.

Scriblio is an “award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress“.  In a nutshell, Scriblio runs over a library automation system, providing Library 2.0 functionality like faceted browsing and user tagging.  The NOBLE consortium is seriously considering open source alternatives or amendments to our current library automation system, so it was great to see Scriblio in action.

Another very interesting presentation was offered by Holladay Penick, of CommentPress.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.   Imagine the implications for the teaching of close reading!  Read more about this excellent tool, developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, at The Chronicle of Higher Education.