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Yearly Archives: 2010

Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness

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.

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2010 08 31 Comments (2)

RDA-as-Service Only

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.

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2010 06 27 Comments (5)

From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks at ALA Annual 2010

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.

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2010 06 24 Comments (3)

“What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?”

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.

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2010 06 22 Comments (0)

Bandwidth of Large Airplanes

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a “hybrid optical and packet network” being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the reference to the station wagon part of the post title:

When you think you have a really zippy network connection, someone will (should?) bring up an old internet adage which says “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.”

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2010 06 08 Comments (8)

OhioLINK Seeks Executive Director

OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of Brill Neumann Associates, and the position description is linked from their current searches page (direct link to PDF, cached link to PDF).

Permanent link to this post (47 words, 11 seconds estimated reading time)
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2010 06 08 Comments (0)

Amazon Catalog Updates

Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I’ve forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess up in this post’s comments section. It was Ron Murray from the Library of Congress. Thanks, Ron!) And it works! Is this a model for crowdsourced corrections to library data?

This is a preview of Amazon Catalog Updates. Read the full post (409 words, 5 images, 1:38 minutes estimated reading time)
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2010 05 12 Comments (10)

UDL: Universal Design…for Libraries?

This week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded again about the principles of Universal Design. The presentation was “Universal Design: Ensuring Access to All Learners” by Maria Morin from Project Enhance at the University of Texas — Pan American. Although she talked about Universal Design for Learning (encompassing assessments, instructional delivery and resource presentation), there was a point in her presentation that I snapped to Universal Design for Libraries.

Here were the two slides:

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2010 04 30 Comments (1)

Mash-Up Request for Submissions

I’m working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of what they think are mash-ups of different resources in the comment area of this post. If you nominate a web-accessible mash-up, please provide a link for it. If you nominate an analog mash-up (they do exist!), please provide a reasonable citation. If it is a hybrid – do your best! Also helpful would be a short statement as to why you think the example is a mash-up, and whether you like the results.

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2010 04 15 Comments (6)

Charleston, SC Visitor’s Center A/V Display

First, sorry about this getting posted prematurely through the DLTJ blog. I was trying the post-from-Flickr function, and it was telling me that the posting wasn’t working. So, it got posted here twice. And it got posted before I was ready; I was hoping it would land in the draft queue so I could edit it with further commentary. Oh, well; live and learn.

Charleston, SC Visitor's Center A/V Display

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2010 03 30 Comments (0)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 2nd of September 2010 at 8:05:43 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/article/2010/

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