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.
Within the span of a recent week we’ve had two views of the OCLC cooperative. In one we have a proposition that OCLC has gone astray from its core roots and in the other a celebration of what OCLC can do. One proposes a new mode of cooperation while the other extols the virtues of the existing cooperative. Both writers claim — independently — to “talk to librarians” and represent the prevailing mood of the profession. Can these two viewpoints be reconciled?
This is a preview of Views on Sharing (or, What Do We Want From OCLC?). Read the full post (930 words, 3:43 minutes estimated reading time)
News of my joining Lyrasis has been officially reported (“Timothy Daniels and Peter Murray to Lead LYRASIS Technology Services” [PDF]) so I can talk about it here now. On September 10th I left OhioLINK to join LYRASIS on September 13th as the assistant director for the newly emerging LYRASIS Technology Services (LTS). Along with Tim Daniels, I’ll be forming a group to help members among the various open source and commercial software options works best for their situations, including options where LYRASIS can effectively and efficiently aggregate Software-as-a-Service hosting options.
This is a preview of Now Working for LYRASIS. Read the full post (223 words, 1 image, 54 seconds estimated reading time)
Through a lengthy recitation of inaccurate facts, Plaintiffs allege six claims against OCLC. In short, Plaintiffs allege that OCLC, a forty-year old non-profit entity, is making it difficult for Innovative and its one-year old sister-company, SkyRiver, to compete and gain market share in the ILL, ILS, and the online cataloging library world. Through a variety of uncited references in their Complaint to “prominent library-related internet blogs,” unnamed commentators, and unattributed articles and reports, as well as through creating an anti-OCLC website, Plaintiffs have levied a propaganda war on OCLC simply because Plaintiffs have been unable to compete successfully with OCLC’s membership base and bibliographic data which OCLC earned through forty years of dedicated service to its member libraries.SkyRiver Technology Solutions, LLC et al v. OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Filing: 16. Page 4. Retrieved from Justia Docs on 18-Sep-2010. (link added)
This is a preview of Early September Summary of the SkyRiver/Innovative vs. OCLC Case. Read the full post (1045 words, 4:11 minutes estimated reading time)
Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn’t rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get messages to member staff and users. But I didn’t get a chance to work on my implementation for a while, so for over a year ideas have bubbled around in my head about ways to apply this technique and improve on it. I finally carved out some spare time to actually work on it, and came up with my take on the concept. The result is the OhioLINK Status-Via-Twitter service.
A demo of the TwitterJS implementation using a copy of the OhioLINK homepage.
This is a preview of Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness. Read the full post (887 words, 1 image, 3:33 minutes estimated reading time)
