 Hello everyone, good to see you. My name is Niels M. Pedersen and I work as a project manager right here in Albus, right in this building actually. It's under the Department of Culture of Citizen Service in a section called ITK in which we do a lot of project development, graphical design, etc. Basically servicing a lot of the departments in the city of Albus. But project development is a major part of this department's work. Today I'm going to talk about how open source changes the Danish library sector. And it's attached to this project or initiative called TIK which has had profound impact on how the Danish library sector has evolved when it's concerned about how we develop IT projects and how we think about the whole mindset about doing the job. And just to let you know, I'm not going to talk very much about liberal arts. Almost nothing at all. Just to let you know. So don't expect anything in that sense. Even though of course there are some coherence and some aspects of it that's related to liberal arts and projects for some people. Let's go ahead. Oops, it's terminated. Yeah, I just said a bit about me working right here in this building, a new building. And in relation to this TIK project up in you can call me community manager for this TIK open source community since 2011 where it really started to kick off. Also project manager smaller projects but usually open source projects like BVOS which I'm going to talk a bit about later on. And yeah, I still consider myself as relatively new in this open source land as I call it. I really like the principles and the core value that that line is behind open source and it's really meant a lot to me in how I see the whole how you develop and how you initiate IT projects. But I still consider myself relatively new. And today's talk, first off, some background. Something that's run in the state of Denmark, a kind of run. And then a bit about how we cope with these challenges that we could see at that time and what we needed and stepped with this and the mission to support it. And then I'll talk about what we actually created, the results that came out of this TIK project and also how we did it of course and what was the major reasons how we could do it. And if I can, this time I'll talk a bit about what's next in status. Back in 2008, the situation in the Danish library sector was this photo is actually simple of how the situation was in relation to the infrastructure that the libraries were using, the IT infrastructure but also actually the mindset that was characteristic at that time. And let me just show a bit more of that. At that time, the libraries had some few challenges and one of those challenges were related to their websites that at that time all the libraries in Denmark, we have a lot, were using very different CMS systems and that small library, smaller municipalities used a lot of resources developing those websites and also maintaining them and that really meant a lot for those, especially the smaller libraries in the sense of having a website that supports dissemination and how to reach the end users. Another issue that was present at that time still is, in a sense, is that the digital concept that was becoming more and more important for the end users versus physical concept, books, etc. They were bought through all these different vendors and constant suppliers and in that sense there was a high dependency towards these vendors because there was no way the libraries could integrate this content to their own websites. So that meant when a user wanted to meet some digital content that wasn't what everyone could be, they had to go to the vendor website and search for it there. So basically that meant when a user played a search on a library website it was only the physical materials, resources that were shown in those but not digital content which the libraries had bought access to. And that was not good. Not very user friendly and not how the libraries really wanted to give the end user a good experience. And another thing that we saw at that time was that the libraries also had a tendency to focus on their own IT projects. They didn't do much in collaborating or trying to reach out to other libraries to build something together to initiate IT projects that could support not only themselves but more libraries. So there was these challenges at that time and that was something that a few visionary and wise men saw an opportunity to turn around. And it started in a plane from Singapore to Denmark and where two leaders in the Danish library sector from the public libraries of Roms and another one from Copenhagen they had a few drinks and talked about how they could cope with these challenges that I'm just going to talk to you about. They had a good talk and they sat down and said to themselves what if we did something about this? And those things that they talked about was we want to take back control. We don't want all these different vendors controlling how we show our resources and how we develop our websites. We want to take back control, define our needs and develop our websites so they actually support what we want to do and what we want to give our end users. And how we should do this was inspired by how the open source projects were developed and they saw these values that are so characteristic of open source development like a collaboration sharing and a collaboration that those values fit it so well into this initiative and how they could cope with these challenges. And another thing they talked about was what if we start doing things for our own good and open up organizations, minds and solutions for all other, not only in the library sector but also more widely. And last but not least, very importantly, what if we build a totally new infrastructure that gives the libraries the ability to use and show the concept that they put the books, the physical concept and the physical concept, the ability to use and show them everywhere on all sorts of devices and all sorts of interactive devices. That was basically the beginning of this chain concept and how it was then formulated in more concrete goals. So they said let's go, let's do it. And they hooked up with another important initiative, an initiator called DVC which is a public funded vendor who already at that time was supporting the library sector by the infrastructure at that time. And they talked to Alus and Plum Hagen and agreed upon we could do something about this, it's actually possible that we together try to set a new initiative and do something about it. So what do we actually need or what did we need? As I mentioned earlier, we needed this current infrastructure and all libraries could use and that could give the ability to use content and to show everywhere on all sorts of devices. One major aspect of it. Another thing was that we needed to share content not only in the libraries, in a single municipality but also across municipalities and across libraries nationwide. Another thing of course was this open source mindset and the values that lies in it, specifically about collaboration and how this can generate innovation and in the end share the results that come out of this collaboration. And also what we needed was this supply vendor control. We wanted to take back the control and to a higher degree to control how we defined the projects, how we developed them and how we developed them further. That was a major issue. Also what was important was to support competition to invite all sorts of partners to participate in this tech community. So therefore it was important to build this community so all both private vendors and public partners could join and see themselves as a credible member of this community and that there was actually some value in this community. And of course in the end the goal was to have better websites for the end users, more cost effective basically. The belief was that if we collaborate and build a common infrastructure in the end it will be more cost effective, cost effective for all of us and also give us better websites and services. And the name was as mentioned earlier called Chinn Concept. Later on the concept was thrown away when it was a success. And supported by this vision of an open ecosystem for cooperation, collaboration and sharing of the sorts of society. Very nice. And that was the future we saw in this vision. And as I mentioned earlier one major aspect of this Chinn Concept Chinn Community was building an entire infrastructure that should support the libraries and this diagram is the most technical thing I'm going to show in this session just to let you know. But this diagram basically shows how the four of this infrastructure that was going to be the foundation for libraries ahead. We have all these concept suppliers, vendors, libraries all sorts of concepts over here. And they were then harvesting that concept and indexing it in a big data repository and creating relations across those data. And that data repository was then the basis for all of the user interfaces interfaces that was going to be built upon this data repository. And that should make it possible for all sorts of interfaces to be presented for the end users. So that's very basic how they saw the new infrastructure and how they should build it. And DVC as I mentioned earlier who was this public vendor, public funded vendor was going to build this infrastructure and do that. So on top of this new Israeli infrastructure it was a national infrastructure as I mentioned earlier for all libraries. That was one of the major goals of this thing initiative and of course based on open source web services. So all those web services that were used in this sense were published as open source and everyone could use those web services and build something else on top of it. Yeah, a national data repository, as I said, harvesting indexing, relating and distributing other major data which could be used for all libraries in Denmark. On top of this, to cope with this challenge I mentioned earlier about the library websites and are very user friendly towards the end user and specifically about how in terms of when you search for resources both physical and digital the libraries were not happy with how it was done at that time on those websites. So this CMS, new CMS that was developed in the community was aimed at supporting this search functionality and giving the user a real good experience doing search on library websites. And one important feature about this website of course was that now it did not only show physical books in the search results but also digital content which was not the case early on. And that was a major step for the libraries. The reason why, also why we choose to build this new CMS and published it for free so libraries could use it and build upon it was that basically all libraries had the same needs in Denmark so why not build it together but still be open for local development and differences. It was still flexible enough for the local libraries to do something else about the user interface but the core was the same. A mobile theme was developed as well. In the beginning I laid on there was a specific app made for smartphones that used this data repository as well and basically were built on the same model as the website. It was a standard app that all libraries then could use and put their own columns and logos and stuff in and give it to the users in the municipalities and libraries. Yeah and a lot of other national web services and sites were eventually developed and launched also using the whole infrastructure and the data repository I mentioned earlier. Just to show a few of the library websites this is the newest version, version 2 which is the one that's being used right now and currently this version is actually being used by more than 70 municipalities and libraries in Denmark so it's a really big thing. As you can see they are all similar but with some smaller differences. As I mentioned earlier the core is the same but it still opens up for local development. I haven't mentioned it, it's Drupal-based and this is almost their website and co-paying slightly different. And another site that was launched a few years back using the same infrastructure and the same data repository was this site where the end users can link e-books and audio books in one site and that site also uses the infrastructure and that's also being used by all libraries in Denmark. They have the same site that they can use for this. Another site in that children also built this infrastructure and also searching into this data repository just another example of what has been created on top of this newer infrastructure. And the more long-term results back in 2011 when I started working in Ting I think we were maybe 20 libraries and municipalities involved in Ting community and that quickly rose to 50 within the next few years and that covered almost 70% of Denmark's population. It was a really fantastic period to be in this project at that time because it just kept evolving and getting bigger and bigger. And at the same time we also had these vendor partners that were involved in the Ting community and they also participated in initiating new projects and collaborating with library partners on ideas and stuff like that. Another major thing was back in 2013 when Ting was evaluated by the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media and at that time the Ting CMS was chosen to be the foundation for the Danish Digital Library which is something that is a collaboration between local government in Denmark which is an organization that supports the interests of all municipalities in Denmark and the Ministry of Culture. And the Danish Digital Library wanted to use this Ting CMS as one of those services that they wanted to give the libraries as a package and not only the CMS but a lot of other services and that decision also had a pretty profound effect on the Ting community afterwards because that meant that the whole development was partly taken into a more bureaucratic organization and that was something that we talked a lot about and it was anything we actually were fond of because we were afraid that it would stop the passion and the enthusiasm in the Ting community. But still there was an advantage to this because they had more money. They could continue to put money in the further development and the quality of the work. Another long-term result that we began to show in the library sector after a few years was just a completely new way of thinking, developing new IT projects and how we should collaborate between libraries, vendors, all who had an interest in these projects. It was really profound and we could see it when the community did events and activities. We could see that all participants had a completely new view of how we should do this and they suddenly could see the potential in this way of thinking. So it basically meant that a completely new mindset was emerged and spreading in the library sector and we still have that today probably. I think the last thing was that we saw a completely new innovation coming out of this community. Suddenly there was a lot of new projects that were founded on the concept and the principles in open source and they came out everywhere in all sorts of libraries and all sorts of ideas. So it was an exciting time. A lot of new projects were initiated. A few other direct projects that we produced concept which is another open source project would support the idea I mentioned in the beginning about sharing content between libraries. This project is about employees at the libraries writing articles and stuff like that and then putting them in one big database and sharing them across libraries so other libraries can use those articles on their websites. People with a project that I was managing was about putting open source in all public library computers. You can see it if you go out and use library computers right here which was basically an open source desktop system and applications. Open source was chosen and also the possibility to remote management these public computers. Another thing, info channel, open source platform for sharing content, large screens you can see that as well if you look at the screens in the library. So, which is basically a new open source community that sprung up a few years back and they were greatly inspired by TIC but their focus was on a higher level on the municipality level. In the beginning they wanted to create a website for the municipalities but it has since spread it and therefore been focusing on other things as well. Yeah, open data arms also a big project in arms that has derived from this whole open source mindset and how we do things in arms. Yeah, some of the major things that actually made it possible to do this was strong leadership. Those guys that in the beginning had this idea and wanted to do it were really passionate people and they were in a position where they could actually do it. That meant a lot for this project. Front movers, the bigger libraries like OS and Copenhagen meant a lot about this project. They took the lead knowingly that it would in the end benefit the smaller ones so that was an important thing too. Of course this openness, collaboration and sharing, the whole value all values in the open source thing was very important as well and how we employed the idea of an ecosystem. Of course we were inspired by other open source communities specifically in terms of how we were governed and the use of governance low hierarchy and so on but also the use of code of conduct how it would behave in this community specifically for project development we had coding guidelines and so forth. Of course another thing about the TIN community was a website that supported the community. We did a lot of events and activities to keep sharing stuff and giving ideas to each other and just to keep the enthusiasm going that meant a lot for those who participated. Yeah, still. Okay, does anyone have any questions? I don't know which is a quick question but you showed us a diagram previously you have your database in the middle and your API and all the time software can read from the database. This API is just for reading only. Do you maintain the proprietary software at the left side to input data to the system still or do you write new software which uses the API to update the database? That's kind of a technical question maybe not people to answer but in terms of the layer of the front end that's going to end users of course that's something we do develop like the websites. Was that what you meant? I'll just more think about when you update the database do you update the data in the proprietary system and then once again import it to the central database? So the API supports it in data as well? Yeah, how it's being done is that of course DBC who's maintaining the data repository did collaborate with these console suppliers and the libraries as well in how they should put these data into this data repository so it was not something that would be done in the proprietary systems it was data that would be basically put in that data repository by DBC. So the API for updating the database is public and everyone can in fact write an application that does it? Yeah basically yes. DBC has a whole website that documents all these services and stuff like that.