Library Journal reports on the results of discussions among SOLINET ((SOLINET is the Southeastern Library Network, Inc. -- a not-for-profit multi-type library cooperative serving the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean.)) members to envision what their library of the future will be. The summary is available as a PDF document as …

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 brings together traditional publisher and library bibliographic data in an interface with the user-contributed paradigm of Wikipedia. Okay, I'll pause for a moment while you …

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 and sent to you in the mail? That's the twist behind a recent partnership announced by Amazon.com, Kirtas Technologies, Emory University …

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 lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost." (If you have iTunes on your desktop/laptop, you …

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 Engelstein, a colleague of Bill's mentioned this in an e-mail:

We were a generation of information explorers. They [Geoff's thirteen– and eleven-year-olds] are a generation …

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), question a perceived division of library automation vendor technical staff with that of open source solution technical staff. I wasn't at Code4Lib this year (I'm going …

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to …

On Tuesday, the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists) released results of their EyeTrack07 study — an examination of reader behavior in the print and online mediums. An article on their website goes into more detail about the initial data but what caught my eye …

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 not the fate, of academic libraries as we navigate through changing expectations and fast-moving, turbulent technologies. In fact, I often find that in explaining my point-of-view …

I got an e-mail tonight from Franziska Marks, Senior Communications Manager at CompuMentor (and home of TechSoup & the TechSoup NetSquared Initiative), about the newly created MaintainIT Project, promoting sustainable best practices and models of technical support for public libraries. They have just launched their "Share your story" campaign to collect …

Extra! Extra! Read All About It! "Explore History as it Happened: Google News Now Has Archive Search" Extra! Extra!

In my imagination I can see and hear the herald of the newspaper carrier on the street corner barking out this call. Except, Kids These Days would probably decry the use …

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!" After allowing the confused stare linger for a moment or the hysterical laughter die down, I explain my thesis: we have something Google doesn't …

At any point in time, there is a college IT director trying to determine whether to upgrade, migrate away from, or stay the …

Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the "Where have all the programmers gone?" post that deserves top billing For those that have not yet encountered this idiom, "top billing" is a motion picture industry term that refers to actors whose …

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's wedding and had the unfortunate timing to catch a case of conjunctivitis in both eyes the day before the ceremony. ("Does your …

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 to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off as such from the rest of the summary …

Last week's Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) with the title "Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?" (subscription required). An excerpt from the beginning:

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every …

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 making progress? are we winning a fight against entropy Defined as: "Measure of disorganization or degradation in the universe that reduces available energy, or …

The plenary session of JCDL this morning was Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law School and University of Oxford) entitled "Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal." This was so good that I couldn't stand to stop and take notes. I did write down one bit: "Libraries are the best hope...for the …

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 go by without comment:

The Evergreen software development team is proud to announce the Evergreen ILS Beta release. Evergreen is …