Another week, another set of threads of library and library-related topics. (Who ever said this profession was boring? Well, I once did, but that is a thread for another day.) Information literacy hit the mainstream this week with noted usability analyst Jakob Nielson noting that internet users need to learn …
We can't leave the hot topic of ebooks behind in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads, but at least it is only the lead thread and not the entire focus of this post. HarperCollins made news when one of …
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 probably the first of many follow-ups in DLTJ as this case keeps taking interesting twists and turns. Also of note this week is …
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 anything new (that I've seen) from HarperCollins itself. There is still plenty more to look at, though. First up is a report from the health care …
It is an all e-books edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads this week. The biggest news was the announcement of the policy change by HarperCollins for ebooks distributed through OverDrive. Beyond that, though, was an announcement of a new sharing model and program through the Internet Archive. Lastly is a slidecast …
Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens This week's Thursday Threads is delayed, but for good reason. If you will indulge me with a personal note, this week saw the passing of our 20-year-old cat, Hickory, and the addition of a 6-month-old kitten, Mittens, to our family. Needless to …
Two entries on big data lead this week's edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first is at the grandest scale possible: a calculation of the amount of information in the world. Add up all the digital memory (in cell phones, computers, and other devices) and analog media (for instance, paper …
This week of DLTJ Thursday Threads covers a wide range of topics. First, from a public policy perspective, is news that the U.S. Senate has a bill proposing the study of an internet "kill-switch" that some are speculating could behave like what happened in Egypt last week. Next, from …
This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a report of their new Kindle Singles program for medium-form digital content and a screen-reader-aware version of the Kindle reader application for PCs. After that is a look at how scholarly discourse is changing -- radically! -- with the availability and …
It wasn't too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week's DLTJ …
It has been the longest of weeks and the shortest of weeks. Longest because of a working weekend with the ALA Midwinter conference in San Diego. Shortest because the activities leading up to, during, and after the conference didn't leave much time for reading items to prepare a DLTJ Thursday …
The turn of the year brings commentary on the past 12 months and thoughts on the future. This edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the relationship between libraries and electronic books with an offer by Sony to explain e-reader hardware to libraries and an opinion piece that libraries need …
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 tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …
When I say "<blank> is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... <blank> can come up with a very precise answer to that question" -- what comes to mind to fill in the <blank>? If you guessed a system developed by IBM to appear alongside …
This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previously); now that the case has been moved to OCLC's home court (the federal district court located in Columbus, OH), it is asking for …
It has been another busy week, and unfortunately Thursday has slipped into Friday. There have been a few updates to earlier Thursday Threads items, so I'm turning this into "Friday Followups" instead. We'll attempt to get back new items next Thursday, but in the meantime take a look at these …
The highlights of the past week are around publishing -- first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to "set a book free" under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of …
