Bob Birchall
Director, CALYX information essentials
Bob Birchall is a director of CALYX information essentials which specializes in the design and deployment of open source solutions for libraries. Calyx has supported the Koha library management system in Australian libraries since 2004 and can advise on the deployment of Kete, Koha and compatible solutions.
Bob is an experienced general, commercial and financial executive with highly-developed skills in strategic planning, quantitative analysis, quality improvement and change management. Bob has had organizational responsibility for the IT function in several organisations, initially at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Private Hospital where he established industry leadership in the application of information technology to the processes of hospital care and administration. Bob has successfully lead numerous IT projects and since 2007 assumes responsibility for business analysis, project management and quality control in all Calyx projects.
Kete : telling our stories together - an open source collaborative archive
Kete is open source software that you can use to create online areas for collaboration for your community. Write topics and upload images, audio, video, documents. Discuss them all. Link them together. It's been called a "relational wiki" and " a mashup between content management and knowledge management". It's a fun way to get things done.
Kete has been developed in New Zealand and is now widely deployed there. It is new to Australia.
At Horowhenua Library Trust, Kete is used to gather stories from the local community. Users can create a topic to which others can add. So someone can tell the story of , say, the steam trains that used to service the district. Then others can add their story, or a photo or a voice recording, perhaps of an interview. Tags can be added to make the entry easier for others to find. Users can browse through topics or do a keyword search which will find all entries that have the same tag. If you search now for ‘trains’ on the Horowhenua Kete site, you will find 46 topics, 166 images, 2 videos and 3 audio files.
The potential for Kete in schools is obvious. For example, what a way to stay in touch with your alumni!
Kete is in use in New Zealand schools. Two brief cases will be presented.
Kete can inter-operate with the Koha open source library management system.
Kete is open source software based on the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework, the MySQL data base and Zebra indexing and search engine.
For more information about Kete visit http://kete.net.nz or contact Calyx.
