Two phishing ((I think these would be classified as spear phishing as defined by Webopedia: "A type of phishing attack that focuses on a single user or department within an organization, addressed from someone within the company in a position of trust and requesting information such as login IDs and …

This morning the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the publication of the final report of the Library Linked Data Incubator Group. The abstract is reproduced below.

The mission of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, chartered from May 2010 through August 2011, has been "to help increase global …

Part experimental, part disruption, and part heads-up in this week's edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The first story is a proof-of-concept demonstration of a way to browse an "infinite" bookshelf of virtual items. Next is the announcement of how a content producer (Pearson) is trying to disrupt a deeply embedded …

I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Access 2011 meeting which starts tomorrow. Coming across from the eastern timezone I had to come a day early, so -- being a self-confessed library nerd -- I checked out the Vancouver Public Library. I'm impressed with not only the physical structure but also the …

The title of this post was updated (replacing "Display" with "Performance") a day after it was originally published. See the update at the bottom of the post for more details.


Last week a federal district court in California decided in favor of the University of California defendants in a lawsuit …

Today's DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the potential for the Amazon Kindle Fire to disrupt the tablet market as we know it now. First is a link to an eight minute video by Clayton Christensen in which he describes his theory of disruptive innovation. Then there is pointer to an …

Last week I saw a post on the IETF Announcement List seeking feedback on the possible formation of a "Reputation Services" working group. That posting has more information, but the basic abstract is posted below. Now I will admit up front that I tend to see the world through librarian-colored …

This week brought news of the Kindle-based e-book lending program through Overdrive, and Peter Brantley has an opinion piece on what this means for Amazon, publishers, and even libraries. From the other e-book powerhouse -- Google -- is a TED talk presentation about the Google Books ngram Viewer. Finally, there is a …

One of the more fascinating aspects of open source software is the role …

Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to …

DLTJ Thursday Threads for two weeks in a row! I'm getting back in the groove. This week has pointers to geeky things (learning about structured data on the web) and not quite so geeky things (thoughts about indexes in ebooks and Amazon's tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing). Well …

When Stanford University's School of Engineering announced its free Artificial Intelligence class last month, the news took the geek world by storm and even worthy of note in the New York Times. The initial news articles made it sound like another example of open educational resources -- a movement popularized by …

After a longer than intended hiatus, DLTJ Thursday Threads is back.

Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to DLTJ's Thursday Threads, visit the sign-up page. If you would like a more raw and immediate …

My employer (LYRASIS) is seeking to engage consultants to create decision support tools in the form of whitepapers, self-guided assessments, and worksheets for libraries considering open source software. This work is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help libraries of all types determine if open …

As part of the Mellon Foundation grant funding the start-up of LYRASIS Technology Services, LTS is to produce a series of tools that enable libraries to decide whether open source is right for their environments. The grant says:

Identify useful tools that can support decision-making and create free, web-based versions …

Back in April, Google announced its announced its A Google a Day project as "a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google." For example, today's question is "This planet’s slow retrograde rotation results in the …

As part of the Mellon Foundation grant funding the start-up of LYRASIS Technology Services, LTS is establishing a registry to provide in-depth comparative, evaluative, and version information about open source products. This registry will be free for viewing and editing (all libraries, not just LYRASIS members, and any provider offering …

I was doing some maintenance on the Amazon EC2 instance that underpins DLTJ and in the process managed to mess up the .ssh/authorized_keys file. (Specifically, I changed the permissions so it was group- and world-readable, which causes `sshd` to not allow users to log in using those private keys …

Ahhhh -- with the annual meeting of the American Library Association out of the way and two major holidays (Canada Day and U.S. Independence Day) behind us, the summer can now start. My formal vacation comes next month, and I haven't yet decided what to do with DLTJ Thursday Threads …

It might have been the week of the annual American Library Association meeting with all the news and announcements and programming that came from it -- as well as getting into the dog days of summer -- but interesting news at the intersection of technology and libraries did not take a pause …