Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Disruptive Library Technology Jester

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Peter E. Murray

Library technologist, open source advocate, striving to think globally while acting locally

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  • Why I Digitally Sign My E-Mail

    Most e-mail messages I send are digitally signed using a process called "Pretty Good Privacy", or PGP. In e-mail applications that don't understand PGP, this digital signature will show up either as an attachment called "PGP.sig" or as a part of the message starting with "BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE" at …

     Posted on  January 02, 2010
     and last updated October 13, 2020
     ·  5 minutes reading time
  • A New Year, a New PGP Key

    It is the start of a new year ((Some have even said it is the start of a new decade, but of course that isn't true. We won't start a new decade until 2011, just like we didn't actually start a new millennium until 2001.)), and it seems like a …

     Posted on  January 02, 2010
     and last updated October 13, 2020
     ·  26 minutes reading time
  • OCLC Introduces an API for Anyone to Access Book Data

    OCLC announced on Monday the availability of a new API for querying the WorldCat database: the WorldCat Basic API. This is a big deal -- it opens up part of the metadata in WorldCat to anyone who wants it (for non-commercial purposes). Previously, access to WorldCat data through the developer network …

     Posted on  December 16, 2009
     and last updated December 16, 2009
     ·  4 minutes reading time
  • OLE Project Design Phase Final Report

    There is an announcement on the OLE Project site that links to the final report as submitted to the Mellon Foundation. This version of the report has minor corrections in the text and now includes information about the group of libraries that have committed to the build phase of the …

     Posted on  November 10, 2009
     and last updated November 10, 2009
  • Index Data on Z39.50 for Dummies

    Earlier this year, Index Data started a new blog. I wanted to call out a series of posts (parts one and two) their newly started blog called Z39.50 for Dummies. Wolfram Schneider on the Index Data staff wrote these two posts.

    In the introductory posting, Wolfram says:

    Z39.50 …

     Posted on  September 10, 2009
     and last updated September 10, 2009
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Google's Watching What We're Doing -- At Least In Aggregate

    OhioLINK Tweet for Adding Google Books links in the Central CatalogAn interesting thing happened at my place of work (OhioLINK) today. We recently added links to our central catalog pointing to manifestations in Google Books. The way it was decided to set it up, though, was to only point to Google Books if the full text was available. We tweeted …

     Posted on  August 26, 2009
     and last updated August 27, 2009
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Proposals for NISO Work Items: Physical Delivery Best Practices and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles

    NISO voting members are currently considering two new work items: a statement of best practices for the physical delivery of library resources and formalizing the NLM journal article DTD de facto standards. The Physical Delivery and Standardized Markup for Journal Articles proposal documents are openly available for download.

    The first …

     Posted on  August 22, 2009
     and last updated August 22, 2009
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Open Library Environment Final Report Draft Released

    Over the weekend, the folks at Duke University coordinating the development of the OLE Project Design Final Report released a draft for public comment. Weighing in at 100 pages (don't let that put you off -- there are lots of pictures), it represents the best thinking of a couple dozen individuals …

     Posted on  July 28, 2009
     and last updated January 02, 2018
  • Three New Search Services: Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft Bing, Google Squared

    It has been a wild few weeks in search engines -- or search-engine-like services. We've seen the introduction of no fewer than three high-profile tools ... Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft Bing, and Google Squared ... each with their own strengths and needing their own techniques -- or, at least, their own distinct frame of reference …

     Posted on  June 16, 2009
     and last updated June 16, 2009
     ·  10 minutes reading time
  • Google Search Engine Adds Support for RDFa, Or Do They?

    Via a post and an interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Google announced limited support for parsing RDFa statements and microformat properties in web page HTML coding and using those statements to enhance the relevance of search results as so-called "rich snippets". In looking at the example review markup outlined …

     Posted on  May 12, 2009
     and last updated May 13, 2009
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Tweaking the New FriendFeed Interface

    FriendFeed went live yesterday with changes to the user interface and back-end systems. The changes were moderately positive, taken as a whole, but there are aspects of the new user interface that I don't like -- the color scheme, the removal of the service icons, and the (over)-use of whitespace …

     Posted on  April 30, 2009
     and last updated April 30, 2009
     ·  3 minutes reading time
  • Advances in OpenSearch Definitions

    Screenshot of adding the OSU Libraries Catalog Search
    Earlier this month, Ohio State University Libraries launched the OSUL Labs area. (Congratulations and kudos to Eric Schnell and the others at OSU that have taken this step to "include customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new …

     Posted on  April 21, 2009
     and last updated April 21, 2009
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Beyond Federated Search Redux

    It started with a post by Carl Grant on the Federated Search Blog: Beyond Federated Search – Winning the Battle and Losing the War?. I bookmarked this in Delicious and copied this extended quote from the text into the bookmark:

    I’ve long argued that librarianship on top of digital information …

     Posted on  April 01, 2009
     and last updated April 01, 2009
     ·  7 minutes reading time
  • Open Library Environment Project Picks Up the Pace

    Participants in the design phase of the OLE Project met in Lawrence, Kansas, earlier this month for a week-long work session. Coming out of the session are several documents that form the foundational elements of the report to be published and delivered to Mellon in July. Interested parties are invited …

     Posted on  March 30, 2009
     and last updated March 30, 2009
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • FulfILLment from Equinox Selected for Statewide Resource Sharing System

    This is an announcement posted by the State Library of Ohio regarding the selection of FulfILLment from Equinox for a statewide resource sharing system.

    OPEN SOURCE STATEWIDE RESOURCE SHARING SYSTEM PROPOSAL FROM EQUINOX HAS BEEN ACCEPTED.

    The State Library of Ohio is pleased to announce Equinox Software Inc. has been …

     Posted on  March 20, 2009
     and last updated March 20, 2009
     ·  1 minutes reading time
  • Anatomy of the Zotero Library to RSS Feed Pipe

    Note! A new feature on the Zotero website does away with the need to use this Yahoo! Pipe. RSS feeds are now generated by the Zotero website itself. Read more about it on the Zotero blog.

    Last week I posted about a Yahoo Pipes construct that turns a Zotero website …

     Posted on  March 06, 2009
     and last updated March 06, 2009
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Can We Outsource the Preservation of Digital Bits?

    A colleague forwarded an article from The Register with news of a new service from Iron Mountain for Cloud-Based File Archiving. It is billed as a "storage archiving service designed to help companies reduce costs of storing and managing static data files." My place of work is facing an increasing …

     Posted on  March 05, 2009
     and last updated March 05, 2009
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • Zotero Library to RSS Feed

    Note! A new feature on the Zotero website does away with the need to use this Yahoo! Pipe. RSS feeds are now generated by the Zotero website itself. Read more about it on the Zotero blog.

    Earlier this week, the Zotero team released its 1.5 Beta version. Among the …

     Posted on  February 28, 2009
     and last updated February 28, 2009
     ·  2 minutes reading time
  • PHP Script for hCalendar to iCalendar Conversion

    I try to do the "right thing" in postings on DLTJ. In the context of this discussion "right" is an attempt to be progressive: including hCalendar microformat markupfor postings that include mention of events. The latest example of this was yesterday's posting of the Learning, Libraries and Technology Conference …

     Posted on  December 10, 2008
     and last updated January 15, 2018
     ·  6 minutes reading time
  • Specifications for Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) published

    ORE Logo The first production version of the Object Reuse and Exchange from the Open Archives Initiative was published today. In the words of the release announcement, ORE provides "the foundation for applications and services that can visualize, preserve, transfer, summarize, and improve access to the aggregations that people use in their …

     Posted on  October 17, 2008
     and last updated October 17, 2008
     ·  1 minutes reading time