Welcome to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. From here you can browse the musings and visions of a library technologist as he walks the fine line between the best of the library profession on one side and the best of technology on the other.
You can navigate through DLTJ several ways. Your first stop might be the introductory material about this blog and the jester himself under the "about" heading to the left. Another way would be to pick a facet below to browse: "by cagetory" for a rough categorization of postings, "by tags" for a finer granularity of topics, or "by date" for a chronological view. Third, use the search box in the left column as a keyword approach to content in DLTJ. And last, recent postings by the Jester can be found below the faceted list.
I hope you enjoy your visit. Please feel free to leave comments where you'd like or contact me directly.
Recent Posts
Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn’t rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get messages to member staff and users. But I didn’t get a chance to work on my implementation for a while, so for over a year ideas have bubbled around in my head about ways to apply this technique and improve on it. I finally carved out some spare time to actually work on it, and came up with my take on the concept. The result is the OhioLINK Status-Via-Twitter service.

A demo of the TwitterJS implementation using a copy of the OhioLINK homepage.
This is a preview of Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness
. Read the full post (888 words, 1 image, 3:33 minutes estimated reading time)
Tagged dynamic-html, javascript, twitter
At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.
This is a preview of RDA-as-Service Only
. Read the full post (832 words, 2 images, 3:20 minutes estimated reading time)
Tagged description, Resource Description and Access, standards
Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their “paper tool” work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.
This is a preview of From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks at ALA Annual 2010
. Read the full post (197 words, 47 seconds estimated reading time)
Tagged ALA Annual Conference 2010, description, frbr, mashup, Object Reuse and Exchange, presentation, semanticweb
At the American Library Association conference this weekend, I’ll be part of a panel presentation from the LITA Emerging Technologies Interest Group with the title “What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?” The presentation will be on Saturday, June 26 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in room 103B of the Washington Convention Center. The publicity blurb:
A new job title of “Emerging Technology Librarian” seems to reflect an awareness among today’s libraries that there is a need for a librarians whose main role is to explore, evaluate, promote, and implement various emerging technologies. 19 librarians in different fields of librarianship at academic, school, and public libraries will discuss the topic of emerging technologies at libraries, their evaluation, implementation, adoption, and management challenges.
This is a preview of “What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?”
. Read the full post (189 words, 45 seconds estimated reading time)
Tagged ALA Annual Conference 2010, conference, emerging technology, Library and Information Technology Association, presentation
Charleston, SC Visitor's Center A/V Display:
Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness:
Riding the Waves of Content and Change:
The Complex World of the Textbook:
PocketModMac: MacOSX PocketMod Generator Via Print Dialog:
Amazon Catalog Updates:
Clay Shirky on the Need for Better Information Filters: