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

U.S. House Votes to Rescind NDIIPP Funding; Bill Now Under Consideration by Senate

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In a federal fiscal year that began without nine of the 11 appropriations bills passed, there is legislation pending in the Senate that would ax funding for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program for the remainder of the fiscal year. Given the current political tone in Washington, one can only guess that someone thought the NDIIPP was part of an earmark. Either that or someone with a bee in their bonnet for the NDIIP is using this moment in time to exact revenge on the program. Either way, this is one moment in time that I’m spurred to join the national debate on legislation before our Congress. (Looking at the site statistics for DLTJ.org I know a number of readers are outside the United States. I hope you’ll indulge me or a moment.)

This is a preview of U.S. House Votes to Rescind NDIIPP Funding; Bill Now Under Consideration by Senate. Read the full post (679 words, 2:43 minutes estimated reading time)

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)