Issue 100: Internet Governance
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive ac...
Thursday Threads
Thursday Threads is a weekly newsletter of hand-crafted links and commentary at the intersection of library technology, broader technology trends, and internet culture. Browse the previous issues below, then subscribe using the form below to get this newsletter by email.
Issue 99: Copyright for Generative Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2, and the like)
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023 This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law. Cecil Mae w...
Issue 98: Time Standards - leap seconds forwards and backwards, moon time, internet time (then and now), and aliens
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267. Translation...
Issue 97: Again with the AI Chatbots
The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. (This specific field of artificial intelligence is “large language models”...
Issue 96: Metadata
Metadata is at the core of what libraries do. (“metadata” is one of the most common tags on this here library technology blog.) We gather information about ...
Issue 95: Updating ChatGPT, Cryptomining, and Website-for-Small-Libraries Threads
This week we revisit threads from a month ago, a year ago, and 12 years ago. ChatGPT references a non-existent book AI generating news articles Crypt...
Issue 94: Controlled Digital Lending
E-books are a prominent theme looking back at a couple of year-end issues of DLTJ Thursday Threads. In 2010, a writer in Boston Review wondered about “books...
Issue 93: Chat-bots Powered by Artificial Intelligence
This week we jump into the world of chat-bots driven by new artificial intelligence language models. The pace of announcements about general-purpose tools d...
Issue 92: Privacy Stories From 2014 Still Echo Today
Back again. Thanks for the comments on the return of the newsletter. I’ve heard that Microsoft Outlook isn’t playing nice with my email theme. (It also is...
Issue 91: Bibliographic Records and Mastodon Migration
Well, this newsletter was off the air longer than I anticipated. A lot has happened since issue 90 in late March: cryptocurrency value falling, Twitter spir...
Issue 90: When Machine Learning Goes Wrong
The People of Ukraine are not forgotten. The Tufts University newspaper published an article this week about a multinational effort to preserve the digital ...
Issue 89: Ukraine’s Libraries, Russia’s Internet, and the Big Deal
The first story below is one from National Public Radio on Ukraine libraries’ efforts are undertaking. Let’s not forget the terror they are facing, the peop...
Issue 88: Battling Censorship, Considering the Right to be Forgotten
For this week’s newsletter introduction, I searched the Flikr service for photographs of libraries in Ukraine. I thought that putting a picture here at the ...
Issue 87: Ukraine War, Artificial Intelligence Art
We are one week into Russia’s war against Ukraine. From here in America, it is hard to understand the reality of a country whose citizens seemed to be going...
Issue 86: Tracking Media Provenance, Digital Classroom Surveillance, Don’t Pixelate to Redact, Android In-App Advertising
I’ve deleted what I originally had here as newsletter-opening-banter. These are serious times. I think the world has radically changed overnight, and roughly...
Issue 85: Privacy-busting Journal Article Fingerprints, Fraud in NFTs, Improve Your Life
The middle of February already. Time is flying; I hope you are having fun. The threads this week: Privacy-busting Fingerprints in Journal Articles Fr...
Issue 84: Chips Go Bad, Learn From Our Cyber Mistakes, Automation at the USPS
The invoice is in. This reengineered blog and the reinvigorated Thursday Threads newsletter cost just US$2.51 last month. All of that cost is in the blog co...
Issue 83: Author’s CDL Thoughts, WWE’s Monopsony, Child’s Library Book
Greetings from the wintery mix that is central Ohio. The local school district called off school yesterday afternoon in preparation for what came today. Al...
Issue 82: Personal Digital Library, Video Preservation, Selling Prayers, and Library Ebook Legislation
The People Have Spoken On a whim, last Thursday I put out a poll with the announcement of last week’s issu...
Issue 81: Controlled Digital Interlibrary Lending, Gamers Revolt Against NFTs, and Cats
Alan the cat Wednesday night with a cat on the lap, composing the next day’s Thursday Threads. How could life get any bet...
Issue 80: Cryptocurrency’s Wasteful Energy Consumption and an Ode to Interlibrary Loan
Welcome to issue 80 of Thursday Threads. I’m so happy many of you chose to stick around and greetings to all of the new subscribers. To those that received m...
Issue 79: Educational Technology Futures, Social Media Legislation, Apollo 11 Launch at 50
Welcome to the re-inaugural issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Counting backward, there were 78 previous issues (all by the most recent still need to be convert...
Issue 78: Battles over strong encryption, IPv4 addresses exhausted while IPv6 surges
Two articles in each of two threads this week: If Strong Encryption is Outlawed… Allocations of IPv4 Internet Addresses Now Restricted; It’s a Good Thi...
Issue 77: New and Interesting from ALA Exhibits
I’m just home from the American Library Association meeting in San Francisco, so this week’s threads are just a brief view of new and interesting things I fo...
Thursday Threads: Data Management Plans, Better Q/A Sessions, App for Bird Identification
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week's threads: Where should yo...
Thursday Threads: Let’s Encrypt is coming, Businesses want you coming to the office, OR2015 Summary
Selected Tweets from “Indexing Repositories” talk by Anurag Archarya, project lead on Google Scholar, 10th International Conference on Open Repositories, Jun...
Thursday Threads: Advertising and Privacy, Giving Away Linux, A View of the Future
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In just a few weeks there will be a g...
Thursday Threads: Man Photocopies Ebook, Google AutoAwesomes Photos, Librarians Called to HTTPS
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In this week's threads: a protest --...
Thursday Threads: Library RFP Registry, Transformed Libraries talk at IMLSfocus, DIY VPN
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Welcome spring in the northern hemisp...
Thursday Threads: Fake Social Media, Netflix is Huge, Secret TPP is Bad
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In this week's Thursday Threads we lo...
Thursday Threads: Web Time Travel, Fake Engine Noise, The Tech Behind Delivering Pictures of Behinds
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In this week's DLTJ Thursday Threads:...
Thursday Threads: Google Maps is Good, DRM is Bad, and Two-factor Authentication can be Ugly
[caption width="360" align="alignright"] Looking at maps, Eastern Carolina University Digital Collections.[/caption] Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p>...
Thursday Threads: All about online privacy, or lack thereof
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Are you paranoid yet? Are you worrie...
Thursday Threads: Mobile Device Encryption, Getty Images for Free
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Just a brief pair of threads this wee...
Thursday Threads: Patron Privacy on Library Sites, Communicating with Developers, Kuali Continued
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In the DLTJ Thursday Threads this wee...
Thursday Threads: Sakai Reverberations, Ada Initiative Fundraising, Cost of Bandwidth
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Welcome to the latest edition of Thur...
Thursday Threads: History of the Future, Kuali change-of-focus, 2018 Mindset List
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This weeks threads are a mixture of t...
Thursday Threads: Twitter Timeline Changes, Report on Future Library Technology, USB Security
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Two weeks in a row! This week's DLTJ...
Thursday Threads: Payment Card Security, Crap Detection, VoIP in your Hand
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Welcome to the revival of DLTJ Thursd...
Thursday Threads: Password Managers, DRM coming to the Browser, Personal Data Brokers
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner It is a security/privacy edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. F...
Thursday Threads: Windows XP end-of-life, Maturing open source models, Trashcans that track you
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Three groups of stories in this long-...
Thursday Threads: Developer Genders, Facebook Release Engineering, Alcohol Among Technologists
Why aren’t there more women in technology? Hmm, let’s see if Twitter can help us find out.
Thursday Threads: Open Source Advocates Twitch at Blackboard’s Strategy and Effect of Copyright/DRM on Access
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Thursday Threads has been a back-burn...
Thursday Threads: Research Works Act, Amazon Kindle Give and Take, OCLC’s Website for Small Libraries
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> I've been away from DLTJ Thursday Thr...
Thursday Threads: Learn to Code in 2012, Issues with Apple’s iBooks Author, SOPA/PIPA Are Dead
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> The internet has survived the great S...
Thursday Threads: Legal Implications of SOPA/PROTECT-IP, Learning from Best Buy, Open Source in Medicine
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner Welcome to the new year! Threads this week include a brief analysis o...
Thursday Threads: Looking Backwards and Looking Forwards
As the last DLTJ Thursday Threads of the year, the stories in this post look back to what we saw in 2011 and look forward to what we may see in 2012. Lookin...
Thursday Threads: SOPA Suspended, Lending Chromebooks, OCLC Introduces WorldShare
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This is the just-in-time-for-the-holi...
Thursday Threads: Alternative to SOPA/PROTECT-IP, Costs of Resource Sharing, Communicating with IT Staff
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner In this week's news we still have activity on legislation before the U...
Thursday Threads: Thanksgiving Edition 2011 – What I’m Thankful For
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner With Thursday Threads coming on a Thanksgiving Thursday, it seems appro...
Thursday Threads: Consumer E-book Commitment, University Press Shorts, Improv Everwhere
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Two serious threads this week and one...
Thursday Threads: Library Linked Data, Shifts in Publishing, Questions for Software Migrations, Hypothes.is Announcement
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> In this weeks thread of topics: the f...
Thursday Threads: Infinite Virtual Bookshelf, Free Learning Management System, List of Cyber Threats
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner Part experimental, part disruption, and part heads-up in this week's e...
Thursday Threads: Disruptive Innovation and the Amazon Kindle Fire
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Today's DLTJ Thursday Threads looks a...
Thursday Threads: Kindle Ebook Lending, Google Ngram Viewer, Collaborative Open Source Development
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week brought news of the Kindle-...
Thursday Threads: Authors Guild Sues Hathi Trust, Libraries Learn from Blockbuster, Publisher’s View of Self-Publishing
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Legal action against the digitization and limit...
Thursday Threads: Structured Data on the Web, Ebook Indexes, Amazon Disintermediates Publishers
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner DLTJ Thursday Threads for two weeks in a row! I'm getting back in the ...
Thursday Threads: Pro-Library Protest Song, How Google Improves it Search, Learning Programming Skills
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner After a longer than intended hiatus, DLTJ Thursday Threads is back. F...
Thursday Threads: History and How-To of Search, DPLA Update, Searching for Jim Gray
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner Ahhhh -- with the annual meeting of the American Library Association ou...
Thursday Threads: Google’s Social Strategy, Big Data, Patriot Act outside U.S., Frightening Copyright Revisited
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> It might have been the week of the an...
Thursday Threads: Publisher/Librarian Rights, Cultural Commons, HTML5 Web Apps, Wifi Management
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner This week's list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the In...
Thursday Threads: RDA Test Results, Author’s Rights Denied, Future Copyright Scenario
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week we got the long-awaited rep...
Thursday Threads: Machine-Meaningful Web Content and Successful IPv6 Test
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Two threads this week: the first is a...
Thursday Threads: Google Book Search summary, Bad Side of Filtering, Academics Editing Wikipedia
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> School is out and the summer heat has...
Thursday Threads: Beyond MARC, Library-controlled DRM, Spam Study
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Threads this week without commentary....
Retro Thursday Threads: Ideas for Publishers, New Reading Experiences, Internet Operating System
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner I recently started reading content from a tablet device and in doing so...
Thursday Threads: Digital Legacies, Zettabytes of Information, Digital Books, Alternate Network Architectures
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Mind-expanding topics this week. The...
Thursday Threads: Cloud Computing and Data Centers – Amazon, Facebook, and Google
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads is about data centers -- those dark r...
Thursday Threads: Kindle Library Lending, Ebooks #1 in Sales, Recommendation Engines
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> I tried to stay away from ebooks again, in this...
Thursday Threads: Teaching Search, OCLC Research Library Partnership, Shelvar App
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner Another week, another set of threads of library and library-related topics. (Wh...
Thursday Threads: HarperCollins/OverDrive (still), Wikimedia Survey, Microsoft Academic Search
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> We can't leave the hot topic of ebook...
Thursday Threads: HarperCollins, Google Book Search Settlement, DPLA, Juggling Robots
It is another e-books issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads with updates on three significant efforts: HarperCollins, Google Book Search Settlement, Digital Public...
Thursday Threads: Google Books Settlement, Cornell on NDAs, Hans Rosling on Literacy
This week's big news is hard to miss -- we have a decision by the judge evaluating the settlement agreement in the Google Book Search lawsuit. This is proba...
Thursday Threads: Open Source in Health Care, The Big Deal, Archives of Web Pages
We’re taking a break this week from the HarperCollins e-book story; although the commentary continues from librarians (and a few authors), there hasn’t been ...
Thursday Threads: HarperCollins (again), Digital Public Library of America, Kindle Millionaires
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> Last week's DLTJ Thursday Threads theme of eboo...
Thursday Threads: HarperCollins Ebook Terms, Internet Archive Ebook Sharing, Future of Collections
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> It is an all e-books edition of DLTJ ...
Thursday Threads: Free Music Scores, Hiring for Attitude, National Broadband Map
[caption id="attachment_2673" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens"][/caption] This week's T...
Thursday Threads: Estimating and Understanding Big Data, Key Loggers Steal Patron Keystrokes
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner Two entries on big data lead this week's edition of DLTJ Thursday Thre...
Thursday Threads: Website Accessibility Reporting Service and Remixes in Film
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads has just two pointers. First, a new ...
Thursday Threads: So-called “Internet Kill-switch”, IP address exhaustion, demographics of P2P piracy
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner This week of DLTJ Thursday Threads covers a wide range of topics. Firs...
Thursday Threads: Kindle Singles and Kindle Accessibility, Sped-up Discourse, ISBN Troubles
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a re...
Thursday Threads: Personal Book Digitizer, Status of Book Piracy, Core Elements of Description
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> It wasn't too long ago that the music...
Thursday Threads: Websites for Small Libraries, Open Source in Govt, Measuring Reliability
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> It has been the longest of weeks and ...
Thursday Threads: Ebooks in Libraries, Prognostications for the Year, Open Source Adoption, Public Domain Day
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> The turn of the year brings commentar...
Thursday Threads: Amazon Pressures Publishers, Academic Spam, Mechanical Turk Spam, Multispectral Imaging
With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher’s view of Amazon’s strong-arm ta...
Thursday Threads: Digital Reference Librarians, First Sale Danger, Open Access, Data Modeling
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner When I say " is a question answering system. A question can be posed...
Thursday Threads: OCLC Moves to Dismiss SkyOCLC, UCLA Sued For Streaming, Paving Cow Paths, Origins of #
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> by E-mail by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week's Thursday Threads highligh...
Friday Followups: RDA Revolt and Cable TV vs. Internet Streaming
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> • by E-mail • by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> It has ...
Thursday Threads: Open Publishing Alternatives, Open Bibliographic Data, Earn an MBA in Facebook, Unconference Planning
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:</p> • by E-mail • by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> The hig...
Thursday Threads: Google Scholar Coverage, Effective Meetings, Librarians as Obstacles, Cable TV
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads by E-mail! Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> No, I am not composing this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads ...
Thursday Threads: Gobs of Video, Memento Submitted, Everybody’s Digital, and Cell Phone as Credit Card
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads by E-mail! Delivered by FeedBurner Another slow Thursday Threads week due to higher priority work duties taking precedent ov...
Thursday Threads: Refining Data, Ebook Costs, Open Bibliographic Data, Copyright Infringement
UPDATE - 22 November 2010: The saga of Illadore (Monica Gaudio) and Cooks Source Magazine (Judith Griggs) draws to an end, with the closing of Cooks Source M...
Thursday Threads: RDA Revolt, Google Book Search Algorithm, Google Helps Improve Web Servers, Google’s Internet Traffic Hugeness
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads by E-mail!Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week is a mostly Google edition...
Thursday Threads: Unprotected Social Media Sites, Value of Free, and Real Life Net Neutrality
Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads by E-mail! Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This week's Thursday Threads look...
Thursday Threads: RDF, Digital Document Tampering, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Enter your email address to receive DLTJ Thursday Threads: Delivered by FeedBurner </form> </div> This is definitely becoming a habit...welco...
Thursday Threads: Disruption in Library Acquisitions, Publishing, and Remedial Education plus Checking Assumptions of Cloud Computing and a National Digital Library
If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall i...
Thursday Threads Bonus: Statistics (Election Polls) and Statistics (World Stats)
This is the second week of this Thursday Threads experiment and already we have a bonus edition. Two other items crossed my browser today that were just too...
Thursday Threads: Technical Debt, QR Codes in National Parks, WebP Image Format, and SSL Cautions
Week #2 of this new project to highlight interesting tidbits from the previous seven days. Well, things that were interesting to me that I hope will be inte...
Thursday Threads: Print-on-Demand, Video Changing the World, Puzzling Out Public Domain, and more
I'm starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads -- summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previou...