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 …

This week I am attending the Open Repositories conference in Austin, Texas, and yesterday was the second preconference day (and the first day I was in Austin). Coming in as I did I only had time to attend two preconference sessions: one on the integration -- or maybe "invasion" of the …

[Update on 10-Jun-2011: The answer to the question of the title is "not really" -- see the update at the bottom of this post and the comments for more information.]

Yesterday Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo! announced a project to promote machine-readable markup for structured data on web pages.

Many sites …

School is out and the summer heat has started, but there is no signs yet that the threads of technology change are slowing down. This week's threads include a healthy review of the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement, the downside of recommendation engines, and how academics are contributing to Wikipedia …

Threads this week without commentary. (It has been a long week that included only one flight of four that actually happened without a delay, cancellation, or redirection.) Big announcements are one from the Library of Congress to re-envision the way bibliographic information travels, one from Douglas County (Colorado) Library's experiment …

Earlier today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Steering Committee put out a call for a "Beta Sprint" to bring to the surface "innovations that could play a part in the building of a digital public library." From the announcement:

The Beta Sprint seeks, ideas, models, prototypes, technical tools …

I recently started reading content from a tablet device and in doing so re-encountered a list of web pages stashed in a Read It Later queue that are over a year old. Not only were these pages interesting enough to read a year ago, but in light of a year's …

Mind-expanding topics this week. The threads start with a potentially morbid, but definitely intriguing, topic: what is to become of our personal digital legacies? If that isn't enough to blow your mind, the next topic is an accounting of the amount of information processed in 2008. Still hanging in there …

One of the great things about the Shibboleth inter-institution single sign-on software package is the ability for the Identity Provider to limit how much a Service Provider knows about a user's request for service. (Not familiar with those capitalized terms? Read on for definitions.) But with this capability comes great …

"How much effort do you want to spend securing your computer systems? Well, how much do you not want to be in front of a reporter's microphone if a security breach happens?" I don't remember the exact words, but that quote strongly resembles something I said to a boss at …

Thanks to everyone for participating in the first Code4Lib Virtual Lightning Talks on Friday. In particular, my gratitude goes out to Ed Corrado, Luciano Ramalho, Michael Appleby, and Jay Luker being the first presenters to try this scheme for connecting library technologists. My apologies also to those who couldn't connect …

Almost a decade ago while at the University of Connecticut I conducted a survey of ARL libraries on their patron privacy practices. The full text of that survey and ARL member responses are available from Google Books and from HathiTrust. Lee Anne George of ARL confirmed via e-mail that permission …

This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads is about data centers -- those dark rooms with all of the blinking lights of computers doing our bidding. Data centers hit the mainstream news this week with the outage at one of Amazon's cloud computing clusters. And since computers and their associated peripherals consume a …