Earlier today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee put out a call for a "Beta Sprint" to bring to the surface "innovations that could play a part in the building of a digital public library." From the announcement:

The Beta Sprint seeks, ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools …

At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled "Collections Futures". I've followed David's ideas since we crossed paths a few years ago; his ideas on applying Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation theories to libraries ring true to me. This presentation …

North America is gaining its third ((or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?)) major bibliographic record utility server this month with the unveiling of SkyRiver

The website is sparse at the moment -- it says: "We're Skyriver, the new bibliographic utility in town. If …

Late last month, the University of Pittsburgh Press and Library System announced a joint effort to revive 500 titles with online and print-on demand access. I originally found this via a post on the Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education (CITE) blog. Since we have been ramping up discussions …

Beyond the public pronouncements of the Google Books Settlement ((See the bottom of this earlier post on DLTJ for a complete list)) are the documents that form the meat of the agreement. The full text of the proposed settlement agreement is 141 pages plus another 162 pages of appendices. The …

Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers -- in the class action lawsuit about materials scanned for the Google Book Search application through the Google Book Search Library Project. This posting on DLTJ includes a …

There is a message floating around the net with a link to a survey about "a completely new online resource discovery service." There is no identifying information information on the survey; obviously the entity that commissioned it wants to remain private. I, however, want to know who this organization is …

The recent announcement by the University of Michigan Libraries about the first-in-a-library installation of an Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. And rightly so. Given Michigan's leadership in the area of digitizing books in the public domain, it is little wonder …

Are we building the "next generation" catalog for us (librarians) or our users? As a read a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance, I have to wonder. Portions of this report are dated ((Although the report itself does not contain a …

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful …

In the course of putting together the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the authors interviewed the four major vendors of integrated library systems in higher education in the U.K.: Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix and Talis. Among the "who are you" and "what do you do" questions were …

As our profession re-examines itself and the services we provide to users, we seem to spend a great deal of time concerned about the way our "web front door" looks and operates. That is, we expect web users to come through the front page of our website and so we …

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 …

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 …

Sue Polanka, head of reference and instruction at the main library of Wright State University, sent a message to the OhioLINK membership today about a new blog she is moderating called No Shelf Required:

No Shelf Required provides a forum for discussion among librarians, publishers, distributors, aggregators, and others interested …

Dear future self,

If you are reading this, you are remembering a time when you ran into a really nasty interception proxy ((Version of the "Proxy Server" Wikipedia page when this posting was written)) and you are looking for a way around it. Do you remember when you were sitting …

OhioLINK's Meg Spernoga pointed our staff to a 30 minute audio documentary called Who Needs Libraries? from Soundprint.org:

As more and more information is available on-line, as Amazon rolls out new software that allows anyone to find any passage in any book, an important question becomes: Who needs libraries …

Google is typically known for its advertising, search engine, and news aggregation services. From Geoffrey Bilder on crosstech comes word of a new Google effort called "knol" that will "to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it." Sound familiar? We typically call such …

Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase "Descriptive Enrichment" over "Bibliographic Control" in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and I'm stepping up to say -- I'm right there with you, Roy! ((And I would have said so in a comment …

The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on a study by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research on the usage of information technology by undergraduate students. Page three of the key findings report [PDF] contains this graph. One of the key findings that shocked me was the predominance of laptop …