The Library of Congress supports the use of open source software in its initiatives, from software development tools to technologies used in its web sites. From late 2008 through spring 2009, the Library of Congress for the first time released its own open source software. This article aims to provide an overview of the issues involved in developing, releasing, building a community around, and supporting open source software, based on the experiences of this project.
Three utilities and a Java Library – the Parallel Retriever, the Bag Validator, VerifyIt, and the BagIt Library – were released on SourceForge, the technology community's hub for open source software distribution and services, under the “Library of Congress Transfer Tools” project.
The tools support validation and transfer of data that conforms to the BagIt specification. The Library plans to release additional tools as part of a suite of solutions and software development resources as they are completed over time.
The article gives an overview of open source software use and development at the Library of Congress.
