We're Disrupted, We're Librarians, and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore
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.
I’ve put in a proposal on the importance of communities in open source software for an “ignite” session at the ALA Annual meeting in Chicago, and I’d appreciate your vote to get the talk into the program. If you have experienced the power and benefit of open source software, you know that the community is just as important as the code. In a 5-minute presentation accompanied by 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds, I’ll be describing the many ways libraries can be a part of an open source community. Here is the brief description of the talk:
The open source method for developing software works best when everyone contributes a little bit to the process. Do you benefit from open source? Do you wish the open source you use was a little better? Don’t know why the community nature of open source is important? Hear what you can do to make the world a better place by nudging your favorite open source project along a path to perfection.
This is a preview of Vote for an ALA2013 Ignite Session on Open Source Communities. Read the full post (243 words, 58 seconds estimated reading time)
This is a review of the Airbender Bluetooth keyboard by New Trent (model IMP38W). I have been testing this unit since January 28, 2013, and traveled with it to Code4Lib in Chicago where I relied on the combination of the Airbender keyboard and iPad for a day of presentations with writing notes and searching the web for information. I received the unit from New Trent for testing and evaluation.
Image from NewTrent.com
This is a preview of A Great iPad Keyboard/Case Combination: New Trent Airbender. Read the full post (645 words, 1 image, 2:35 minutes estimated reading time)
ResourceSync — a joint effort of NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team with work funded by the Sloan Foundation — has published a draft specification that I urge members of the library technology community to look at. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project is modern web architecture technologies to enable the synchronization of the objects themselves, not just their metadata. From the abstract of the draft specification:
This ResourceSync specification describes a synchronization framework for the web consisting of various capabilities that allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with a server’s evolving resources. The capabilities can be combined in a modular manner to meet local or community requirements. The specification also describes how a server can advertise the synchronization capabilities it supports and how third party systems can discover this information. The specification repurposes the document formats defined by the Sitemap protocol and introduces extensions for them.
This is a preview of ResourceSync Specification Draft Published for Comment. Read the full post (193 words, 46 seconds estimated reading time)
Last month’s HathiTrust newsletter had an interesting technical tidbit at the top about access to out-of-print and brittle or missing items:
One of the lawful uses of in-copyright works HathiTrust has been pursuing is to provide access on an institutional basis to works that fall under United States Copyright Law Section 108 conditions: works in HathiTrust that are not available on the market at a fair price, and for which print copies owned by HathiTrust member institutions are damaged, deteriorating, lost or stolen. As a part of becoming a member, institutions are required to submit information about their print holdings for fee calculation purposes. We have also been requesting information about the holdings status and condition of works, to facilitate uses of works where permissible by law (specifications for HathiTrust holdings data are available at http://www.hathitrust.org/print_holdings).
This is a preview of Interesting Shibboleth Use Case: Enforcing Geographic Restrictions. Read the full post (898 words, 3:36 minutes estimated reading time)
