The free software community has developed a number of tools that are useful to researchers. This presentation introduces four tools: the LibX toolbar to extend library searching throughout your Web experience; the Zotero plug-in for collecting, organizing, and citing your research materials; the LU|ZONE|UL institutional repository built on DSpace for making your research openly accessible; and the quick lookup Linux laptops that have made quick searches fast and easy for library visitors and saved Laurentian University tens of thousands of dollars in hardware replacement costs.

Increasingly, students choose to use general search engines for research rather than taking advantage of the resources provided by university libraries. As university libraries offer services such as the careful selection of material and subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals, it is important that the library become integrated into research workflows. Existing technologies on library servers do not provide the level of integration we believe is most helpful to users. LibX is a browser add-on designed to assist research by making library resources more accessible than they are through the library's own tools. It provides a client-side interface to these library services through the web browser. This integration enhances productivity and augments the user's existing information-seeking behavior. We extended the existing Firefox version of LibX into a browser-agnostic framework, allowing LibX services to be provided on multiple browser platforms. We created a toolbar and context menu system, written in C#, to extend the existing LibX features to the Internet Explorer web browser. The primary focus of this work is on the software engineering challenges presented in creating this version. We also designed a new framework for web localization, allowing pages viewed by the user to be modified on the client side by rules written by LibX developers, library staff, or individual users. The framework also provides a way for these rules to be distributed, updated, and composed, enhancing the browsing experience by augmenting it with additional information. The design and behavior of this framework is a secondary focus of this work. / Master of Science

LibX is a browser extension that provides direct access to library resources. LibX enables users to add additional features to a webpage, such as placing a tutorial video on a digital library homepage. LibX achieves this ability of enhancing web pages through library applications, called LibApps. A LibApp examines a webpage, extracts and processes information of the page, and modifies the web content. It is possible to build an unlimited number of LibApps and enhance web pages in numerous ways. The developers of LibX team cannot build all possible LibApps by themselves. Hence, we decided to create an environment that allows users to create and share LibApps, thereby creating an eco-system of library applications. We developed the LibApp Builder, a cloud-based end-user programming tool that assists users in creating customized library applications with minimal effort. We designed an easy-to-understand meta-design language model with modularized, reusable components. The LibApp language model is designed to hide the complex programming details from the target audiences who are mostly non-technical users, primarily librarians. The LibApp Builder is a web-based editor that allows users to build and test LibApps in an executable environment. A built-in publishing mechanism allows users to group LibApps into packages and publish them in AtomPub format. Any user can directly reuse or adapt published components as required. Two error checking mechanisms have been built into the LibApp Builder viz., type checking and semantic checking to enhance user experience and reduce debugging effort. Additionally, the web interface displays help tooltips to guide users through the process of building a LibApp. We adhered to good software engineering practices such as the agile development model and the model-view-controller design paradigm. The LibApp Builder is built with the ZK AJAX framework and provides a rich interactive user interface. The LibApp Builder is integrated with an optimized full-text, fuzzy search engine and facilitates faceted search by exploiting the BaseX XML database system and XPath/XQuery processor. Users can locate and reuse existing language components through the search interface. To summarize, the LibApp Builder is a community platform for librarians to create, adapt and share LibApps. / Master of Science

LibX is a browser plugin that allows users to access library resources directly from their browser. Many libraries that wished to adopt LibX needed to customize a version of LibX for their own institution. Most librarians did not possess the necessary knowledge of XML, running scripts and the underlying implementation of LibX required to create customized, functional LibX versions for their own institutions. Therefore, we have developed a web-based tool called the LibX Edition Builder that empowers librarians to create their own customized LibX version (editions), effortlessly. The Edition Builder provides rich interactivity to its users by exploiting the ZK AJAX framework whose components we adapted. The Edition Builder provides automatic detection of relevant library resources based on several heuristics which we have developed, which reduces the time and effort required to configure these resources. We have used sound software engineering techniques such as agile development principles, code generation techniques, and the model-view-controller design paradigm to maximize maintainability of the Edition Builder, which enables us to easily incorporate changing functional requirements in the Edition Builder. The LibX Edition Builder is currently used by over 800 registered users who have created over 400 editions. We have carried out a custom log-based usability evaluation that examined the interactions of our users over a 5 month period. This evaluation has shown that the Edition Builder can dramatically reduce the time needed to customize LibX editions and is being increasingly adopted by the library community. / Master of Science