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
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 a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking about a strikingly similar topic at lunch yesterday: not just that advertisements could pay for new technology but that ads could pay for content in the libraries. I felt strangely uncomfortable with the concept, and I still do, so (in jester fashion) what better way to explore the discomfort than in a posting here on DLTJ.
This is a preview of
Selling Placement in Library Search Results
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Read the full post (848 words, estimated 3:24 mins reading time)
Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:
This is a preview of
“Object Reuse and Exchange” Beta Specifications Now Available
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Read the full post (312 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
After the release of the latest update to the Macintosh operating system (10.5.3), some users were reporting a “login loop” to MacFixIt.com. I followed the always helpful advice on MacFixIt for updating the operating system, and after the first reboot everything came back fine on my PowerBook G4 I thought I was in the clear. With the second reboot, though, I started seeing the login loop: the machine boots fine, but when you put the username and password in, the system hangs for about 20 seconds before displaying the login window again. Clearly something is hosed, and fortunately I was able to fix it.
This is a preview of
Fixing a Mac OSX Leopard Login Loop Caused by Launch Services
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Read the full post (540 words, estimated 2:10 mins reading time)
May 30, 2008Peter Murrayproduct
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Towards the end of the last chapter of his book, Nicholas Carr relates an anecdote about the visit of a guest speaker to the Google headquarters (emphasis added):
George Dyson, a historian of technology…, Freeman Dyson, was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech at the party celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of von Neumann’s invention [of an electronic computer that could store in its memory the instructions for its use]. “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, “Dyson would later recall of his visit, “I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air.” After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plan to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all of those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an [artificial intelligence engine].”
Fixing a Mac OSX Leopard Login Loop Caused by Launch Services:
Is OCLC's Change of WorldCat Record Use/Transfer Policy Related to the Google Book Search Agreement?:
Google Book Search Settlement: Introduction, Public Announcements:
"Draft Principles for Digitized Content" from the Digitization Policy Task Force of ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy:
George Mason University Sued by Thomson Reuters over Zotero: