The ILS without patron data: open questions
In my prior two posts, I outlined a strategy to minimize personally identifiable information in library automation systems (idea overview, impact on FOLIO). ...
L/IS Profession
The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment realized with FOLIO
In the previous blog post, I outlined the concept of a library system with no personally identifiable information as a way to safeguard a patron’s right to p...
The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment
Library systems hold significant information about patrons, including their search and reading histories. For librarians, ensuring the privacy and confident...
On Open Library Services: Reflections from the GIL User Group Meeting
In May 2023 I was asked to join the opening session at Georgia’s GIL User Group Meeting. Along with Chris Sharp and Emily Gore, we reflected on the conferen...
Trip Report: NISO Plus Forum 2022
Earlier this week, NISO held its one-day NISO Plus Forum for 2022. This was an in-person meeting that is intended to feed into the onl...
On the Code4Lib Journal’s Two Proposed Metrics article
Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) editor here. Becky Yoose’s Twitter thread has stirred up a great deal of attention to an article published yesterday. This post has m...
More Thoughts on Pre-recording Conference Talks
Over the weekend, I posted an article here about pre-recording conference talks and sent a tweet about the idea on Monday. I hoped to generate discussion abo...
Should All Conference Talks be Pre-recorded?
The Code4Lib conference was last week. That meeting used all pre-recorded talks, and we saw the benefits of pre-recording for attendees, presenters, and con...
Engaging with Open Source Technologies
These are the presentation notes for the Engaging with Open Source Technologies presentation during the Open Source Publishing Technologies: Current Status a...
Ensuring System Interoperability: Readers and Ebooks — A NISO/BISG Forum
These are the presentation notes for the Ensuring System Interoperability presentation during the Readers and Ebooks: Making The Connection during the NISO/B...
Privacy in the Context of Content Platforms and Discovery Tools
These are the presentation notes for the Privacy in the Context of Content Platforms and Discovery Tools presentation during the NISO Information Freedom, Et...
Anxious Anger – or: why does my profession want to become a closed club
I’m in the Austin, Texas, airport – having just left the closing session of the Re-Think It conference – and I’m wondering what the heck is happening to my c...
Open Access Attitudes of Computer Science Professors
My Communications of the ACM came in the main recently, and in an article about the future of scholarly publishing in computer science (in general -- and wha...
Mystery in the Library
A colleague e-mailed me the other day expressing appreciation for the DLTJ blog in part, and also describing a mystery that she is running in her library: [c...
Model Language on Library Data Ownership
In September, Carl Grant wrote a blog post on the ownership of library data ("We have a problem... another vendor appearing to need education about exactly W...
The Security Implications of Teaching Librarians to Program
Should librarians be learning to how to develop software? This theme has come up in the past few years ((Going back to Karin Dalziel’s 2008 Why every ...
Libraries as Provisioner, Quartermaster, and Curator
Yesterday I heard Catherine Murray-Rust give a keynote at the Georgia Knowledge Repository workshop. She used the phrase, and I think I transcribed this cor...
But Is It a Library? – Reflections on ‘Little Free Libraries’
[caption id="flickr" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Little Free Library, near Cafe Zoma by Jeremy Cusker, on Flickr"][/caption]There are these place...
A Walk Through the Vancouver Public Library
I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Access 2011 meeting which starts tomorrow. Coming across from the eastern timezone I had to come a day early, so...
Teaching Search Engine Literacy with A Google A Day
[caption id="attachment_3120" align="alignright" width="300" caption="A Google a Day screenshot"][/caption] Back in April, Google announced its announced its...
Encryption of Patron Data in Modern Integrated Library Systems
"How much effort do you want to spend securing your computer systems? Well, how much do you not want to be in front of a reporter's microphone if a security...
Full Text of ARL SPEC Kit 278 on Library Patron Privacy Now Online
Almost a decade ago while at the University of Connecticut I conducted a survey of ARL libraries on their patron privacy practices. The full text of that su...
The Challenges and Rewards of Open Source
Below is the text of an article I wrote for the LYRASIS member newsletter in which I talk about how a community of users of open source software is as import...
Defining Metadata and Making Metadata Accessible
In preparation for the last webinar of the three-part series "Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future", I'm reading again Karen Coyle's "Library Data in a...
MARC isn’t Dead, but it is a Dead End
This week I sat in on the first of the three "Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future" webinars being hosted by ALA. This one was hosted by Karen Coyle w...
A History of the OCLC Tax-Exemption Status
One of the baffling elements I've found in discussions of the history of OCLC is that of its tax exempt status under Ohio law. The latest example of this co...
Views on Sharing (or, What Do We Want From OCLC?)
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...
Early September Summary of the SkyRiver/Innovative vs. OCLC Case
On September 9th, OCLC filed its first substantial response with the court to the antitrust lawsuit file by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces. And in a mot...
OhioLINK Seeks Executive Director
OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of ...
UDL: Universal Design…for Libraries?
This week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded ...
Extensible Catalog Project Seeking Developers in Innovative Ways
Last month, the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project posted job openings for Java developers. These are short-term, grant-funded projects and, having been on th...
More on What Does It Mean to Be a Member of OCLC
Jay Jordan's remarks during the OCLC Update Breakfast and the discussion at the Developers Network table at that breakfast generated further fuel for my prev...
What Does It Mean to Be a Member of OCLC?
This morning I was at the OCLC Americas Regional Council Meeting just prior to the opening of the ALA Midwinter 2010 meeting. In addition to the prepared ta...
Shared Twitter Updates Done Right: The Case of NPRTechTeam
[caption id="attachment_1198" align="alignright" width="437" caption="Image capture of NPR Tech Team Twitter account."][/caption]All day today, the staff at ...
On the Pitfalls of Social Media: Learning from Clinical Reader
As a youth I remember intently studying the troubles of others -- what they did when they got into trouble and how they got out of it. If the saying "You Le...
On the Pitfalls of Social Media: The Case of Clinical Reader
As libraries feel the need to join the social media landscape to meet a segment of their user population already there, it is useful to step back and get acc...
For the heart and soul of librarianship – human description versus fulltext analytics
A non-librarian colleague forwarded a link to an essay by Mark Pesce called The Alexandrine Dilemma. From the context of one of the comments, I think it mig...
“We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”
May 30, 2008Peter Murrayproduct Review of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google Find it in your library 0.3</div> Towards ...
Getting the Word Out: LISWire and LISEvents
Blake Carver (of LISNews and LISHost fame) announced two new projects yesterday: LISWire and LISEvents. In the same spirit that I would categorize open sou...