This is the just-in-time-for-the-holidays edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee suspended work on SOPA, and there was much relief from the technology community. The Palo Alto Public Library announced plans to lend Chromebooks (laptops with Google's cloud-based operating system) to patrons. And OCLC announced a …

I've been keeping an eye on the House Judiciary Committee markup session for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that have happened over the past two days along with the tweets that have been going out in reaction to the proceedings. One of the running threads in the commentary has …

In this week's news we still have activity on legislation before the U.S. Congress on measures to protect intellectual property on the internet. This is serious stuff with serious people trying to make this go quietly into law. Well, it may not go quietly into law, but it has …

Earlier this month there was an amazing groundswell of opposition to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I participated in a 1-day anticensorship campaign designed to bring awareness …

With Thursday Threads coming on a Thanksgiving Thursday, it seems appropriate to use a theme of what I'm thankful for. So, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads I'm offering three things: open source software, the internet, and public libraries. Reading this on Thanksgiving? Feel free to offer what you …

Two serious threads this week and one fun one. The first serious story is a look at the attitudes of e-book consumers from the Book Industry Study Group, including a finding that almost half of all e-book consumers would wait for an electronic edition up to three months after the …

This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R …

In this weeks thread of topics: the final report of library linked data, an interview with one of the executives of Wiley Publishing, important questions to ask when considering major system migrations, and the announcement of work to begin on a new comment and evaluation overlay layer for the web …

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 …

Below is the text of an article I wrote for a LYRASIS member newsletter in which I talk about the nature of governance in open source software projects. I’m reposting it here for the DLTJ readership.

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 …