Tim Spaulding, founder of LibraryThing, hails the launch of Open Library as "an open source alternative to OCLC." The code for the application is open, and the book metadata itself is open and editable by users. The Open Library home page invites us to "Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update." The project features searchable full text and an online book viewer. The term "books" is apparently meant to include scientific articles as well. A catalog of such Borgesian proportions has obvious potential for scholarly application, but there seems to be a lot of overlap with services like Project Gutenberg, Google Scholar and Books, Open WorldCat, Connotea, CiteULike, Goodreads, and even Spaulding's own LibraryThing.

An interesting open source development in the U.K. announced last week; from the press release:

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

Toru Iiyoshi, who directs the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, has written a provocative essay entitled Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door?. Iiyoshi argues that the wide-spread adoption of open educational resources is stymied by three major hurdles. The first is that we don't do a good job of describing how to use educational resources in such a way that someone else can adapt and adopt them. He writes "although the tools and resources are readily available, transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy.... Thus, a crucial task before us is to build intellectual and technical capacity for transforming "tacit knowledge" into "commonly usable knowledge." Second, the academic reward structure has stacked the deck against pedagogical innovation by not rewarding the sharing of information about teaching. He writes "If there are no incentives for faculty to use and enrich open educational goods to transform their teaching and student learning, pedagogical practice will always struggle to advance." Third, the deck is further stacked by virtue of our existing organizational structures and publication schemes. He writes, "...we must look beyond institutional boundaries and connect efforts among many settings and open source entrepreneurs."

Derek Morrison recently started an interesting discussion in  Auricle responding to a  major deployment ("world's largest) of Moodle in New Zealand.  Morrison cautions "An open source monoculture is still a monoculture and monocultures tend to get monotonous and prone to disease." Richard Treves offers substantial rebuttal to Morrison, which prompted a second round of discussion about the "monoculture" issue.