Digital Public Library of America Sends Out Call For a Beta Sprint
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 c...
Disruption in Libraries
Slidecast of David Lewis’ “Collections Futures” Talk
At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled "Collections Futures". I've followed Dav...
SkyRiver - a(nother) Bibliographic Utility
North America is gaining its third ((or fourth? Does Open Library count as a bibliographic utility?)) major bibliographic record utility server this month wi...
Online Editions of Out-of-Print Books Result from Library/Press Partnership at Univ of Pittsburgh
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. ...
Google Book Search Settlement: Reviewing the Notice of Settlement
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 fo...
Google Book Search Settlement: Introduction, Public Announcements
Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and pu...
Seeking Details About Mystery Discovery Layer Company
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 infor...
Espresso Book Machine Print-on-Demand
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="252" caption="Espresso Book Machine version 1.5"]Image no longer available[/caption]The recent announcement by the U...
A Catalog for the “Next Generation” or the Current Generation?
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 ...
Riding the Waves of Content and Change
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,...
A Note to ILS Vendors: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
In the course of putting together the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the authors interviewed the four major vendors of integrated library sys...
A “Vision for Development” – Excerpt from the JISC/SCONUL Study
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"...
Selling Placement in Library Search Results
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...
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 op...
New Blog for Ebooks in Libraries: “No Shelf Required”
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 bl...
Note to Future Self: Use ssh -D to bypass annoying interception proxies
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" Wik...
Soundprint’s ‘Who Needs Libraries?’
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 ...
Google Sets Its Sights On Hosting Knowledge
Google is typically known for its advertising, search engine, and news aggregation services. From Geoffrey Bilder on crosstech comes word of a new Google ef...
Getting On With ‘The Future of Descriptive Enrichment’
Roy Tennant is advocating the phrase "Descriptive Enrichment" over "Bibliographic Control" in response to draft report from the Library of Congress Working G...
Undergraduates Own More Laptops than Desktops
The Chronicle of Higher Education today reports on a study by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research on the usage of information technology by undergraduat...
SOLINET’s Collective Vision of the Future of Libraries
Library Journal reports on the results of discussions among SOLINET ((SOLINET is the Southeastern Library Network, Inc. -- a not-for-profit multi-type librar...
Open Library Demonstration Screencast
Earlier this week, Aaron Swartz of the Internet Archive announced the demonstration website of the Open Library project, a new kind of book catalog that brin...
Out of Print Books Get New Life via Amazon and Participating Libraries
Why settle for mere digital copies of books (a la the Google Book Search project and the Open Content Alliance) when you can have an edition printed, bound a...
“iTunes U” for Libraries?
A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education "Wired Campus" section describes the new iTunes U portal, "a spot on the site that will collect college...
Information Explorers versus Editors
A post by Bill Harris at "Dubious Quality" with the title Information got caught up in my Technorati filter for disruptive change in libraries. Geoff Engels...
Stereotypical Vendors?
Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), questi...
Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization
Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Ma...
What Librarians Could Learn From Journalists
On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study &mda...
Pocket-sized Graph of the Theory of Disruptive Innovation
I really like Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Innovation (as he proposed in his book The Innovator's Dilemma). It succinctly describes the challenges, if...
What a NASA/Google Mashup Might Mean for Libraries
Ron Murray (no relation) from the Library of Congress sent me this announcement about a joint NASA/Google partnership, which starts: NASA Ames Research Cente...
MaintainIT Project Gears Up to Support Public Access Computing
I got an e-mail tonight from Franziska Marks, Senior Communications Manager at CompuMentor (and home of TechSoup & the TechSoup NetSquared Initiative), a...
Google News Archive Search — Where Are the Links to Content from Libraries?
Extra! Extra! Read All About It! "Explore History as it Happened: Google News Now Has Archive Search" Extra! Extra! </p> In my imagination I can ...
Just In Time Acquisitions versus Just In Case Acquisitions
What of a service existed where the patrons selected an item they needed out of our library catalog and that item was delivered to the patron even when the l...
Can Google be Out-Googled?
I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of "Don't fear Google; Don't Chase Google; Let's Out-Google Google!" ...
Open Source Software: Should You Bet Your Career On It?
At any point in time, there is a college IT director trying to determine whether to upgrade, migrate away from, or stay the course with some software package...
Appreciating our Heritage while Embracing a Future
Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the "Where have all the programmers gone?" p...
Automated Faceted Analysis In Google?
Has anyone else started seeing what looks to be faceted topical headings at the top of Google searches? This past weekend I was the groomsman at my brother'...
It’s All About User Services: A Summary and Commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting
What follows is a summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting at ALA annual conference in New Orleans on 25-Jun-2006. What I've tried t...
Disruption in Publishing
Last week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) wit...
“Is the Writing On The Wall?” — Take 2
Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday's Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language...
Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System?
While in UNC-CH for JCDL I've had occasion to rant with/at some people about the state of the integrated library system marketplace — including, of cou...
“Cautiously Optimistic”
During the cookies and lemonade break during JCDL this afternoon I surprised one of the well-respected elders of the field with this question: are we really...
Librarians as Gatekeepers
The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled "Open Information: Redaction, Restricti...
Evergreen Goes Beta, Signals the End of the World As We Know It
I've got a ton of work to do, but I couldn't let this announcement from Brad LaJeunesse via Dusty Gres on Pub4Lib via Karen Schneider on the newNGC4LIB list ...
Who Said You Couldn’t Catalog the Internet?
I seem to remember, in the early heady days of the internet, there was a cry from the library profession to "Catalog the Internet" -- to create descriptive r...
The Problem with MARC and AACR: the World Doesn’t Disco Anymore
My undergraduate background is in computer science, and from that perspective I have a great deal of admiration for MARC and AACR as well as their creators a...
Digital Books, Layperson’s Summary
The New York Times Sunday Magazine had an article with the title Scan This Book! that one could consider to be the best (latest) summary of the race to digit...
Google’s “Related Links” as a library’s “Find More Items Like This”?
On Thursday, Google announced a new service in the labs: Related Links Last week, we quietly rolled out Google Related Links, which lets you display a unit ...
Updated Disruption in Libraries Bibliography; New Location
I've moved the bibliography of the theory of disruptive innovation as applied to libraries and higher education to a new location. If you are reading this p...
Christensen on “Disruption in Education”
Somehow I completely missed this paper by Clayton Christensen, Sally Aaron, and William Clark from the EDUCAUSE 2001 Forum for the Future of Higher Education...
David Lewis in Ohio
OhioLINK was pleased to host David Lewis, Director of the Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis Library, to talk about "Disruptive Innovation ...
Where have all the programmers gone? Taking command of our destiny
What follows is pure conjecture; I did not live through the time in question, I can only speculate based on biased evidence and anecdotal hearsay. This is a...
The MARC format: the Library Equivalent to Reliance on Oil?
Thomas Friedman, author of Longitudes and Attitudes and The World Is Flat, has a column in Friday's New York Times called The New 'Sputnik' Challenges: They ...