PLU and its students have a history of both using and contributing to open-source software projects. Herein is a list of some of the open projects PLU has and continues to contribute to.
Uedit was developed by Darren Struthers and Kevin Freitas in the Digital Media Center in 2005. It is now in production at PLU as our web content management system. It is used by faculty, staff, and students alike to design, manage, and publish their PLU web-pages. The key to Uedit is it's ability to let authors focus on content and style and not the technical details that often make distract the average computer user from web-design. If you have an active ePass go ahead and try it out.
Contact PLU's web developer Darren Struthers at dstruthers@plu.edu for more information or for an instructional session.
Gatekeeper is PLU's network registration management and trouble ticket system. It is a web-application that aids administrators in internet connection configuration, trouble tickets for ResNet, IP management, DNS, VLAN and DHCP management, as well as many other things. It was developed mainly by students in the CATS department. A complete re-write of the system, known as Gatekeeper 4, is in the works by Eric Finseth (05') and Aaron Gerow (06'). The new system will abstract many of the PLU-specific functions of the system and make them modular thereby allowing other institutions to potentially implement Gatekeeper on their networks.
Contact Aaron Gerow at gerowam@plu.edu or at 253.536.5021 for more information about the Gatekeeper 4 project.
The Digital Asset Manager, or DAM, is a LAMP-based system that provides the PLU community with the ability to publish and manage digital assets. The system abstracts the meta-data for given assets into a layer that facilitates quick and easy migrations such as collection moves and changing server technology. Written primarily by Layne Nordgren, director of instructional resources, the system has been in use at PLU for three years. DAM boasts an extensible framework for emerging forms of digital assets. DAM is near the top of the list of projects to open source from PLU due to the extensible nature of the asset tracking modules. Future work on the project includes database-layer abstraction and modularizing the design.
Contact Layne Nordgren at layne.nordgren@plu.edu for more information about the Digital Asset Manager.
Inventory Live is a wireless open source approach to collection inventory and maintenance. Employed at the PLU library, Inventory Live allows circulation desk workers and technical services staff to track and maintain the extensive collection within the library. The system allows a user to traverse the stacks physically with a WiFi-enabled laptop to take inventory and make changes to it. The DAM is integrated with the Voyager system that allows for online searching and maintenance of the library's collection. Inventory Live tracks inventory progress by providing quality control for a variety of errors such as mis-shelved, lost, damaged, or non-cataloged articles in the collection.
Inventory Live was produced by Dianne Harris, Layne Nordgren, and Debra Morrow to extend the library's service capabilities.
pGina is a login system that replaces the standard Windows GINA
to allow integration with multiple cross-platform authentication
mechanisms. pGina was written PLU seniors Nate Yocom and Michael
Wright in 2002 as a capstone project. Yocom has maintained the project through a number of
versions and aided its adoption all over the world. Yocom's own XPA
Systems is a private consulting group that specializes in designing and
implementing login solutions around pGina. The project is licensed
fully open source under the GPL.
- Check out www.pgina.org.
Sakai CLE / Framework is the larger development name for the Sakai system. CLE stands for Collaboration and Learning Environment. Though Sakai started as an online learning course management system its structure has grown to be very modular and extensible making the core "Sakai" more of a framework on top of which one can write myriad tools to better aide each unique implementation. In this way Sakai is very attractive to universities because it is free and very customizable.
As a whole sakai is developed by many universities around the world. University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, Virginia Tech, and the University of Indiana are some of the big players in community. Sakai also has a more solidified backing known as the Sakai Foundation, a non-profit software firm.
Go to the Sakai page at this site for more information. Faculty and Staff can contact the Digital Media Center in the Library at x8728 or at dmc@plu.edu for support questions. If you have an active ePass with PLU you can login to Sakai at PLU.
- See the project home-age at sakaiproject.org.
- Check out the collaborative development network at collab.sakaiproject.org (which is acutally run on the Sakai application).