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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

On Innovation in the ILS Marketplace

Last month the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force of the DLF called a meeting of library system vendors (including one commercial support organization for open source ILS software) to talk about the state of computer-to-computer interfaces in-to and out-of the ILS. The meeting comes as the work of the task force is winding down. An outcome of the meeting, the “Berkeley Accord,” was posted last week to Peter Brantley’s blog. The accord has three basic parts: automated interfaces for offloading records from the ILS, a mechanism for determining the availability of an item, and a scheme for creating persistent links to records.

This is a preview of On Innovation in the ILS Marketplace. Read the full post (828 words, estimated 3:19 mins reading time)
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2008 04 12 Comments (3) Permalink

Preserving Digital Video

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we would get a preservation-worthy digital copy from the producer/distributor and forego the physical version.

There is quite a lot written on preserving video, but I wanted to distill the requirements down into statements that vendors could reasonably provide today. I think these are pretty sound requirements, but I’m looking for feedback. In particular, I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer of closed caption text from the publisher/distributor; suggestions are welcome.

This is a preview of Preserving Digital Video. Read the full post (763 words, estimated 3:03 mins reading time)
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2008 04 08 Comments (0) Permalink

DLTJ Updated to WordPress 2.5

Unlike previous upgrades, this left some functionality broken — notably some of the links in the second block under the “about” heading to the left (if you are reading this from http://dltj.org/ itself). But, you know what? — it’s Friday afternoon and all of the important bits are working. I think. So if you see anything odd, please let me know.

This is a preview of DLTJ Updated to WordPress 2.5. Read the full post (83 words, estimated 20 secs reading time)
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2008 04 04 Comments (0) Permalink

LC’s Adoption of Silverlight — Good Deal for Microsoft, Bad Deal for the Rest of Us

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was giving $3 million in “funding, software, technological expertise, training and support services” to the Library of Congress to build on-site and online exhibits of LC historical collections. Others have commented on this. From a Jester’s point of view, I’ve got problems with this on two fronts: Microsoft using LC in a cheap marketing ploy and LC’s use of a new technology that impedes access for no good technical reason.

This is a preview of LC’s Adoption of Silverlight — Good Deal for Microsoft, Bad Deal for the Rest of Us. Read the full post (1120 words, estimated 4:29 mins reading time)
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2008 03 31 Comments (5) Permalink
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 22nd of May 2008 at 4:13:40 PM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/page/4/

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