Jerome McDonough of the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented a paper this summer at the Balisage conference with the title Structural Metadata and the Social Limitation of Interoperability: A Sociotechnical View of XML and Digital Library Standards Development. ((McDonough, J. (2008 …

Earlier this week, Lumifi Inc. announced a new version of their research platform "to better serve students, professionals and others in dealing with information overload." Lumifi is a private corporation based in Maryland, and this is their second major release of their service. (The first was announced in January 2008 …

Last Friday, Herbert Van de Sompel posted a message to various mailing lists about a proposed revision to the serialization of OAI-ORE into Atom. The proposal by Michael Nelson, Robert Sanderson, and Herbert has two key components:

• To express an ORE Aggregation at the level of an Atom Entry …

Dealing with SPAM e-mail is a real hassle. Dealing with SPAM e-mail as a mailing list owner is an even bigger hassle. Here are some tips for dealing with SPAM e-mail on mailing lists using the Mailman software package.

The Symptoms

Unless you are making your users as well as …

The famous 1993 cartoon from The New Yorker has the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The question at the moment is: when you're on the internet, how do you know you are …

Carl Lagoze of Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the release of the beta form of the ORE specifications yesterday. Here is the full text of their announcement:

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object …

After the release of the latest update to the Macintosh operating system (10.5.3), some users were reporting a "login loop" to MacFixIt.com. I followed the always helpful advice on MacFixIt for updating the operating system, and after the first reboot everything came back fine on my PowerBook …

Last month OCLC announced a new service offering for long-term storage of libraries' digital collections. Called Digital Archive™, it provides "a secure storage environment for you to easily manage and monitor the health of your master files and digital originals." Barbara Quint has an article in Information Today called "OCLC …

I've been a fan of Getting Things Done as a technique for managing projects, but it was only recently that I settled on OmniFocus as the "trusted system" collecting all of my next actions. One of the things I like about OmniFocus -- as a rich, Mac-only application -- is its ability …

In reading a background paper for the American Social History Online portal, I was reacquainted with a paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Thomas Habing and Tim Cole from UIUC called "Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services." ((Foulonneau, M., Habing, T.G., Cole, T.W. (2006 …

My place of work is looking to acquire educational videos in a digital form with an eye towards long-term preservation. At this point we receive a physical form (preferably DVD, but sometimes VHS) and digitize it to a very lossy access format (RealMedia, in this case). With this change, we …

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was giving $3 million in "funding, software, technological expertise, training and support services" to the Library of Congress to build on-site and online exhibits of LC historical collections. Others have commented on this. From a Jester's point of view, I've got problems with …

Wired magazine published a brief story and online photo gallery of the book scanning and print-on-demand projects at the Internet Archive. It is a fascinating glimpse into their vision and processes. Included below are cropped thumbnails and part of the text captions that accompanied the pictures in the Wired online …

Via a weekly wrap-up post by Dion Almaer on the Google Code Blog comes mention of a Google Tech Talk video from their IPv6 Conference 2008. It is a panel discussion called "What will the IPv6 Internet look like?" and it offers insight into the difficulties of transitioning to the …

Stu Hicks, one of OhioLINK's systems engineers, told the OhioLINK staff last night about a new program at Microsoft called DreamSpark. Through this program, post-secondary students around the world who are attending accredited schools or universities can download some of Microsoft's big developer and designer tools free of charge. At …

I've been following the discussion by Stu Weibel on his blog about the relationship between Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM), and I think I'm as confused as ever. It comes as a two part posting with comments by Andy Powell Pete Johnston (apologies, Pete), Mikael …

On the ImageLib mailing list, Rob Lancefield (Manager of Museum Information Services for Wesleyan University) posted a link to the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (UPDIG) for image creators. The introduction says: "These 12 guidelines — provided as a Quick Guide plus an in-depth Complete Guide — aim to clarify the issues …

The title of this post is true, under certain circumstances. Last week's e-mail brought word from Michael Robertson of Backdoor Dialing - Free Calling to Millions of U.S. Phones. By using Gizmo, the freely available, no-spyware computer-based telephony application, it is now possible to call about 10% of the mobile …

What's the deal with NCIP? For those that don't know, NCIP is the NISO protocol that attempts to "define the various transactions needed to support circulation activities among independent library systems." For example, "patron and item inquiry and update transactions, such as hold or reserve, check-out, renew, and check-in."

I …