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 action.
(See Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?, Thursday Threads issue 89.)
A year later now, that discussion has …
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023
This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law.
Cecil Mae was a wonderful person.
I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy.
She enjoyed playing …
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267. Translation of the Latin original from circa 397 CE.
This week we look at time from a few points of view:
The hot technology in the news now is chatbots driven by artificial intelligence.
(This specific field of artificial intelligence is "large language models" or LLM).
There were two LLM threads in DLTJ Thursday Threadsissue 95 and a whole issue six weeks ago (issue 93).
I want to promise that …
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 the resources available to patrons, then massage it and slice it and sort it and display it in ways that help patrons find …
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 after Amazon."
In 2011, an author for O'Reilly Media's Radar blog wrote that "readers sure to like ebooks" and "DRM is full of …
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 driven by large training sets of texts or images has quickened, and the barrier to experimenting with these tools has dropped.
There are now fully-functional websites where …
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 isn't playing fair...someone forwarded the newsletter back to me, and when I replied that person said the view of the newsletter in the …
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 spiraling (maybe a death-spiral...can't be too sure), and (in the U.S.) a whopper of a mid-term election season.
All is well here in …
The People of Ukraine are not forgotten.
The Tufts University newspaper published an article this week about a multinational effort to preserve the digital and digitized cultural heritage of the country.
On the other side of the war, Russian citizens are downloading Wikipedia out of fear of more drastic network …
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 people stepping up to meet their community's needs, and those who have lost their lives in the Russian war.
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 top of a grand reading room with dark wood shelves and neat rows of books would help us remember that a significant part of our …
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 about normal lives just a short time ago.
I find it also hard to know what to say to people whose …
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 7.9 billion of us are not in positions to do anything about it. To those that are in positions to do something about it and to …
Greetings from the wintery mix that is central Ohio.
The local school district called off school yesterday afternoon in preparation for what came today.
Also yesterday: Ohio's own "Buckeye Chuck" predicted an early spring.
Let's be grateful for snow days (and teenagers who shovel snow) and for predictions of early …
The People Have Spoken
On a whim, last Thursday I put out a poll with the announcement of last week's issue.
Out of the three threads, controlled digital lending, gamers and NFTs, and cats, the winner was cats.
The sample size was small—five votes—so I'm not ready to …
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 my email last Thursday giving you a heads-up that a new issue would be coming to your inbox but then didn't …
