Disruption in Libraries

SkyRiver - a(nother) Bibliographic Utility

Posted on 2 minute read

North America is gaining its third ((or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?)) major bibliographic record utility server this month wi...

Espresso Book Machine Print-on-Demand

Posted on 3 minute read

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="252" caption="Espresso Book Machine version 1.5"]Image no longer available[/caption]The recent announcement by the U...

Riding the Waves of Content and Change

Posted on 5 minute read

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement,...

Selling Placement in Library Search Results

Posted on 4 minute read

This morning's Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title "Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?" that links to...

On Innovation in the ILS Marketplace

Posted on 4 minute read

Last month the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force of the DLF called a meeting of library system vendors (including one commercial support organization for op...

Soundprint’s ‘Who Needs Libraries?’

Posted on less than 1 minute read

OhioLINK's Meg Spernoga pointed our staff to a 30 minute audio documentary called Who Needs Libraries? from Soundprint.org: As more and more information is ...

Google Sets Its Sights On Hosting Knowledge

Posted on 4 minute read

Google is typically known for its advertising, search engine, and news aggregation services. From Geoffrey Bilder on crosstech comes word of a new Google ef...

Undergraduates Own More Laptops than Desktops

Posted on 1 minute read

The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on a study by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research on the usage of information technology by undergraduat...

Open Library Demonstration Screencast

Posted on 10 minute read

Earlier this week, Aaron Swartz of the Internet Archive announced the demonstration website of the Open Library project, a new kind of book catalog that brin...

“iTunes U” for Libraries?

Posted on 1 minute read

A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Wired Campus" section describes the new iTunes U portal, "a spot on the site that will collect college...

Information Explorers versus Editors

Posted on less than 1 minute read

A post by Bill Harris at "Dubious Quality" with the title Information got caught up in my Technorati filter for disruptive change in libraries. Geoff Engels...

Stereotypical Vendors?

Posted on 5 minute read

Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), questi...

What Librarians Could Learn From Journalists

Posted on 1 minute read

On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study &mda...

What a NASA/Google Mashup Might Mean for Libraries

Posted on 1 minute read

Ron Murray (no relation) from the Library of Congress sent me this announcement about a joint NASA/Google partnership, which starts: NASA Ames Research Cente...

Can Google be Out-Googled?

Posted on 7 minute read

I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of "Don't fear Google; Don't Chase Google; Let's Out-Google Google!" ...

Automated Faceted Analysis In Google?

Posted on 1 minute read

Has anyone else started seeing what looks to be faceted topical headings at the top of Google searches? This past weekend I was the groomsman at my brother'...

Disruption in Publishing

Posted on 1 minute read

Last week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) wit...

“Is the Writing On The Wall?” — Take 2

Posted on 2 minute read

Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday's Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language...

“Cautiously Optimistic”

Posted on 4 minute read

During the cookies and lemonade break during JCDL this afternoon I surprised one of the well-respected elders of the field with this question: are we really...

Librarians as Gatekeepers

Posted on less than 1 minute read

The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled "Open Information: Redaction, Restricti...

Who Said You Couldn’t Catalog the Internet?

Posted on 3 minute read

I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to "Catalog the Internet" -- to create descriptive r...

Digital Books, Layperson’s Summary

Posted on 2 minute read

The New York Times Sunday Magazine had an article with the title Scan This Book! that one could consider to be the best (latest) summary of the race to digit...

Christensen on “Disruption in Education”

Posted on less than 1 minute read

Somehow I completely missed this paper by Clayton Christensen, Sally Aaron, and William Clark from the EDUCAUSE 2001 Forum for the Future of Higher Education...

David Lewis in Ohio

Posted on less than 1 minute read

OhioLINK was pleased to host David Lewis, Director of the Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis Library, to talk about "Disruptive Innovation ...