Arnaud talked about how his company AFI changed from a proprietary to Open Source model. AFI merged with Biblibre about 6 months ago. Now people from both companies work on Bokeh.
Bokeh is designed to offer librarians tools to allow managing the digital environment. It runs on top of any ILS, using ftp and ILSDI.
Bokeh offers
- Enriched OPAC
- CMS
- Content aggregator
- Digital library
Bokeh can automatically harvest data from the internet and add it to your bibliographic eg wikipedia entries, book covers dvd trailers etc, with no librarian intervention. The CMS is very simple to administer. It can also aggregate content so you can display your catalogue, your resources from OAI or VOD and other catalogues. Bokeh also functions as a digital library allowing you to store your texts, video, images, audio etc. The idea of having it aggregated is to allow for better patron services. Some examples are
- Personalised mobile services
- Realtime interaction with social media
You can also use Bokeh as a conference software, to provide and collect information from delegates. Another idea is allow multi channel communication, different displays/interfaces for different devices. Bokeh can also simulate FRBR using an automatic detection algorithm to group manifestations of the same work. Another thing Bokeh tries to do is use words the patrons understand, not library jargon. Bokeh offers tags, built on the fly from the search result, a prettier way of offering a facet.
Bokeh is multilingual, but French is the main language. Only French libraries use it currently. Arnaud showed a bunch of examples, which you probably need to see, it’s too hard to try to explain in words.
Arnaud has put up his slides here
