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

Same Cubicle, New Title, New Challenges

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Here is a bit of personal news to report. Tom Sanville, OhioLINK’s executive director, announced today that I am changing roles at OhioLINK. Here is what he said:

I’m pleased to announce that Peter Murray will assume the position of Assistant Director, New Service Development effective immediately. In light of the formation of 13 task forces to pursue investigation of our strategic priorities it is critical that we have a skilled OhioLINK staff member with primary responsibility to analyze, recommend, and coordinate plans for the introduction and use of new information technologies and services by OhioLINK and its member institutions. Through Peter’s tracking and contact with information and library hardware, software, and database vendors, he will provide leadership and support to the OhioLINK staff, committees, task forces and other planning groups.

This is a preview of Same Cubicle, New Title, New Challenges. Read the full post (295 words, 1:11 minutes estimated reading time)

Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”

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Richard Rodgers presented this talk based on the work of he and MacKenzie Smith in the Digital Library Research Group at MIT. The original abstract of the presentation was:

Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories–is each repository an island or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an extensive ‘tool chain’ for gathering and manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”. Read the full post (518 words, 2:04 minutes estimated reading time)

Presentation Summary: “MPTStore: Implementing a fast, scalable, and stable RDBMS-backed triplestore for Fedora and the NSDL”

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Chris Wilper gave this presentation on behalf of the work that he and Aaron Birkland did to improve the performance of the Fedora Resource Index.

Version 2.0 of the Fedora digital object repository software added a feature called the Resource Index (RI). Based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples, the RI provided quick access to relationships between objects as well as to the descriptive elements of the object itself. After about two years of use using the Kowari software, the RI has pointed to a number of challenges for “triplestores”: scalability (few triplestores are designed for greater than 100 million triples); performance; and stability (frequent “rebuilds”).

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “MPTStore: Implementing a fast, scalable, and stable RDBMS-backed triplestore for Fedora and the NSDL”. Read the full post (593 words, 2:22 minutes estimated reading time)

Open Source for Open Repositories — New Models for Software Development and Sustainability

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This is a summary of a presentation by James L. Hilton, Vice President and CIO of University of Virginia, at the opening keynote session of Open Repositories 2007. I tried to capture the esessence of his presentation, and omissions, contradictions, and inaccuracies in this summary are likely mine and not that of the presenter.

Setting the stage

This is a moment in which institutions may be willing to invest in open source development in a systematic way (as opposed to what could currently be characterized as an ad hoc fashion) driven by these factors:

This is a preview of Open Source for Open Repositories — New Models for Software Development and Sustainability. Read the full post (1659 words, 6:38 minutes estimated reading time)