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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

Advances in OpenSearch Definitions

Screenshot of adding the OSU Libraries Catalog Search

Earlier this month, Ohio State University Libraries launched the OSUL Labs area. (Congratulations and kudos to Eric Schnell and the others at OSU that have taken this step to “include customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new products and services.”) Their first release is an OpenSearch definition for the library catalog. It has been ages since I’ve messed with OpenSearch, and I didn’t remember (or didn’t know it was possible) to have the function add the OpenSearch definition right from the OpenSearch menu, as shown in this figure from the OSUL announcement of this feature. (What I remember is the “programatic” way of doing this.) The autodiscovery is done with a special <link> tag in the head of the HTML:

<link rel="search"
  type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
  href="http://library.osu.edu/opensearch.xml"
  title="Add OSU Libraries Catalog search" />
This is a preview of Advances in OpenSearch Definitions. Read the full post (234 words, 1 image, 56 seconds estimated reading time)
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2009 04 21 Comments (0) Permalink

Some Navel-Gazing: A Meta-Post about DLTJ

I usually don’t post about the act of blogging itself (I wonder how many middle-aged blogs have a similar post), but the confluence of a couple of things caused me to look at DLTJ with a critical and curious eye. The first was the work by David Pattern in Measuring the emotional content of librar* blogs. The second was a post by Leslie Carr on the effect of Google users in finding information.

ANEW Categorization

Graphic showing the ANEW quadrants

Figure 1. Graphic showing the ANEW quadrants.

This is a preview of Some Navel-Gazing: A Meta-Post about DLTJ. Read the full post (737 words, 4 images, 2:57 minutes estimated reading time)
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2009 04 20 Comments (2) Permalink

Letters Begin Flying in Objection to the Proposed Google Book Search Settlement

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search Settlement this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The first comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (found by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the “‘most favored nation’ clause favoring Google is removed and the deal’s ‘orphan works’ provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google.” The letter in PDF is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.

This is a preview of Letters Begin Flying in Objection to the Proposed Google Book Search Settlement. Read the full post (523 words, 2:06 minutes estimated reading time)
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2009 04 17 Comments (2) Permalink

Clarification Offered for “Technology: The textbook of the future” in Nature

A recent issue of Nature published an article by Declan Butler called “Technology: The textbook of the future” included a paragraph about OhioLINK’s exploration of digital textbooks:

Ongoing tests of CourseSmart e-textbooks by the University System of Ohio show that they reduce costs — the average US student forks out some $900 annually on print textbooks — and students using them perform just as well as when using paper versions, says Peter Murray, deputy head of new service development at the Ohio Library and Information Network in Columbus, Ohio, which assists the University System of Ohio on the project.

This is a preview of Clarification Offered for “Technology: The textbook of the future” in Nature. Read the full post (224 words, 54 seconds estimated reading time)
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2009 04 07 Comments (2) Permalink
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 2nd of September 2010 at 8:02:37 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/page/20/

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