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 …

It has been years since I've done meaningful work with JPEG2000, but I still try to keep tabs on what is happening in that community. In that vein, Rob Buckley -- formerly of Xerox Research and now on his own with a consulting business -- pointed me to an announcement about a …

I tried to stay away from ebooks again, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads (I managed to do so last week), but the threads of announcements and conversations are too crucial to ignore. Just yesterday Amazon and OverDrive announced plans to lend library ebooks to Kindle users. The press …

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 …

About two years ago I wrote a blog post wondering if we could outsource the preservation of digital bits. What prompted that blog post was an announcement from Iron Mountain of a Cloud-Based File Archiving service. Since then there have been a number of other services that have sprung up …

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 …

It is another e-books issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads with updates on three significant efforts: HarperCollins, Google Book Search Settlement, Digital Public Library of America. And, just for fun and to keep this from turning into purely a legal and blue-sky policy blog, we have a video of juggling robots …

One of the highlights of the Code4Lib annual meeting is the “lightning talk” rounds. A lightning talk is a fast-paced 5 minute talk on a topic of the presenter’s choosing. They are usually scheduled on an ad-hoc, first-come-first-served basis on the day of the event. They are an opportunity …

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 …

This afternoon, Judge Denny Chin released the opinion of the court rejecting the proposed settlement agreement between authors/publishers and Google in the Google Book Search settlement. ARL's Public Policy Twitter account seems to have been the first to …

Eric Morgan posted a message to the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries mailing list this morning that points to a announcement by the University of Florida library that they are now applying a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication statement to MARC records they create. Their announcement says:

Beginning March 2011 …

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 …