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 …

The W3C Library Linked Data (LLD) Incubator Group invites librarians, publishers, linked data researchers, and other interested parties to review and comment on drafts of reports to be published later this year. The LLD group has been chartered from May 2010 through August 2011 to prepare a series of reports …

This week's list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia on the growing pressure between publishers and libraries over the appropriate rights and permissions for scholarly material. In that same vein, Joe Lucia writes about his vision for libraries and the cultural …

Wandering into public or semi-public wireless networks makes me nervous because I know how my network traffic can be easily watched, and because I'm a geek with control issues I'm even more nervous when using devices that I can't get to the insides of (like phones and tablets). One way …

This week we got the long-awaited report from the group testing RDA to see if its use would be approved for the major U.S. national libraries. And the answer? An unsatisfying, if predictable, maybe-but-not-yet. This week also brought new examples of the tensions between authors and publishers and libraries …

The main Open Repositories conference concluded this morning with a keynote by Clifford Lynch and the separate user group meetings began. I tried to transcribe Cliff's great address as best I could from my notes; hopefully I'm not misrepresenting what he said in any significant ways. He has some thought-provoking …

Today was the second day of the Open Repositories conference, and the big highlight of the day for me was the panel discussion on using Fedora as a storage and service layer for DSpace. This seems like such a natural fit, but with two pieces of complex software the devil …

Two threads this week: the first is an announcement from the major search engine on a way they agree to discover machine-processable information in web pages. The search engines want this so they can do a better job understanding the information web pages, but it stomps on the linked data …

Today was the first main conference day of the Open Repositories conference in Austin, Texas. There are 300 developers here from 20 countries and 30 states. I have lots of notes from the sessions, and I've tried to make sense of some of them below before I lose track of …